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University of California • Berkeley

Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

University History Series
Department of History at Berkeley

Delmer M. Brown

PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE HISTORY,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1946-1977

With an Introduction by
Irwin Scheiner

Interviews Conducted by

Ann Lage

in 1995

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of
coi.lecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.

************************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Delmer M.
Brown dated June 25, 1995. The manuscript is thereby made available
for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript,
including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library
of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the
manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Delmer M. Brown require that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Delmer M. Brown, "Professor of Japanese
History, University of California,
Berkeley, 1946-1977," an oral history
conducted in 1995 by Ann Lage, Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 2000.

Copy no.

Delmer Brown, early 1990s.

Photo by G. Paul Bishop, Jr.

Cataloguing information

BROWN, Delmer M. (b. 1909) Professor of history

Professor of Japanese History, University of California. Berkeley, 1946-
1977. 2000, x, 410 pp.

Family and boyhood in Kansas and southern California; teaching in Japan,
1932-1938: observations of Japanese culture, religion, and militarism;
graduate studies in history, Stanford and Harvard; WWII service as naval
intelligence officer, Pearl Harbor, 1940-1945; professor, Department of
History, UC Berkeley, 1946-1970s: departmental leadership, key faculty
appointments, effects of the loyalty oath, student unrest in the 1960s,
changes in curriculum, chairing the department, 1957-1961 and 1972-1975;
East Asian studies at Berkeley: the East Asiatic Library and the Center for
Japanese Studies; Academic Senate chairman, 1971-1972, and service on the
budget committee; publications on Japanese history and culture, working
with Japanese scholars; reflections on teaching, foreign language studies,
Education Abroad Program, graduate students; family, religion, and
retirement.

Introduction by Irwin Scheiner, Professor of history.

Interviewed 1995 by Ann Lage for the Department of History at
Berkeley Series, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Bancroft Library, on behalf of future researchers,

wishes to thank the following persons and organizations

whose contributions have made possible the oral histories in

the Department of History at Berkeley series.

Department of History, University of California, Berkeley

with funds from the

Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professorship of European History
A.F. and May T. Morrison Professorship of History

Jane K. Sather Chair in History
Abraham D. Shepard Chair in History

and the following individuals:

Carroll Brentano

Delmer M. Brown

Gene A. Brucker

Randolph and Frances Starn

In Memory of Ursula Griswold Bingham:

Dana T. Bartholomew

James Tyler Patterson, Jr.

John S. Service

for the Delmer M. Brown Oral History:
Center for Japanese Studies, University of California, Berkeley

TABLE OF CONTENTS- -Delmer M. Brown

PREFACE by Carroll Brentano, Gene Brucker, and Ann Lage i

INTRODUCTION by Irwin Scheiner v

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Ann Lage vii

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION x

I PERSONAL BACKGROUND AND EDUCATION, 1909-1932 1
Family Background, Missouri and Kansas 1
Move to California, 1925 7
High School in Orange County 8
Methodist Church Youth Group 11
Pomona College 11
Stanford University, 1930-1932 13
Developing an Interest in the Far East 16

II TEACHING IN JAPAN, 1932-1938 19
Arrival and Getting Settled 19
The Classroom, Basketball, and Social Life 21
Learning Japanese 24
Maeda Toshiie Diary Translations 25
A Deepening Interest in Japanese Studies 27
First Wife, Mary Nelson Logan Brown 29
Japanese Students 32
An American in Japan 34
Neighbor and Fellow Teacher, the Nazi 38
"Emperorism"--The Religion of Japan 40
Militarism in Japan 42
The Party and the Geisha Girl 44
The Young Officers' Movement, 1936 47
Decision to Leave Japan 50
Herbert Norman and Howard Norman 5 1

III GRADUATE SCHOOL AND THE NAVY 56
Stanford University, and Professor Yamato Ichihashi 56
Professor Lynn White 57
Professor Fagan of Economics 63
Professor Payson J. Treat 64
Master's Thesis on Firearms in Sixteenth-Century Japan 65
Naval Intelligence Officer, 1940-1945 68

Pearl Harbor 73

Leaving the Navy, December 1945 82

Completing the Ph.D. Dissertation 84

IV THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT AT BERKELEY, 1940s-1950s, AND BROWN'S
CHAIRMANSHIP, 1957-1961 86
Woodbridge Bingham 86
Brown's Recruitment to UC Berkeley, 1946 88
UC Berkeley's East Asian Languages Department 89
Key Players in the History Department in the Late 1940s 91
Establishing the East Asian Library, 1947 92
Higher Education Consulting in Japan, 1948 97
Structure of UC Berkeley's Department of History 103
Departmental Rivalries, Strong Personalities 104
Appointments to the Department 107
The Revolution of the "Young Turks" 110
Carl Bridenbaugh's Role, and His Departure from Berkeley 116
Teaching, Research, and University Public Service: Criteria

for an Appointment and Promotion 119

Shifting Interests and Perspectives in History 120

The Loyalty Oath Controversy 123

The Gender Issue: Only One Woman History Professor 124
Increasing Secretarial and Administrative Assistance as

Department Chair 125
Endowed Chairs and Professional Promotion Policies 128
History Department Library, Lounge, and Telephones 132
Experiments in Teaching: Lecture Classes and Proseminars 134
Some Thoughts on the Value of Positive Learning and Project-
oriented Teaching 136

V THE TURBULENT 1960s AND 1970s ON THE BERKELEY CAMPUS 141
The Free Speech Movement and its Effect on Teaching 141
Faculty Politics: Committee of Two Hundred, Faculty Forum 143
Professor Franz Schumann 147
Determining Curriculum: Coverage and Faculty Interest 149
Brown Helps Prevent an All-University Strike, December 1966 150
Opposing Visions: Control or Freedom 156
More on Effective Teaching and Educational Reform 158
Faculty Conservatism Regarding Educational Change 161
The Vietnam Era, Brown's Role with the Asia Foundation 162
Brown's Second Chairmanship, 1972-1975 169

Budgets, Class Size, Videotaping 169

Department Chairman's Role in Faculty Appointments 174
Affirmative Action and Proposed Changes to the Tenure

Committee 177

Confidentiality in Hiring Recommendations 181

Faculty Teaching Loads 182

More on Ronald Anderson 335

Some Final Notes on Graduate Students 336
The Graduate Theological Union, and the Study of Religion in

Japan 337

Brown's Personal Religious Outlook 342

X FAMILY AND RETIREMENT 348
Meeting and Marrying Margaret 348
Children: Ren and Charlotte 349
Family Journey Around the World, 1956 351
More About Charlotte and Her Dogs 354
Grandchildren and Great-grandchildren 355
Travels with Carolyn 357
Mary Louise in Japan, and Great-granddaughter Katie "The Talker" 358
Life with Margaret at Rossmoor, a Retirement Community 360
Studying and Writing after Retirement: More on the The Cambridge

History Project 363
The Center for Shinto Studies at the Graduate Theological Union 366

"The Great Goddess Amaterasu" and Other Writings 369

A Party to Honor Professor Brown 370

A Very Important Speech at the Shinto Shrine, Jinla Honcho 371

Other Activities, and a Final Note on Waterford at Rossmoor 376

TAPE GUIDE 378

APPENDIX

A Minutes of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate,

December 5 and 8, 1966 379

B Delmer Brown Curriculum Vita 384

INTERVIEWS ON THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 389

INDEX 401

PREFACE TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BERKELEY ORAL HISTORY SERIES

The Department of History at Berkeley oral history series grew out
of Gene Brucker's (Professor of History, 1954-1991) 1995 Faculty
Research Lecture on "History at Berkeley." In developing his lecture on
the transformations in the UC Berkeley Department of History in the
latter half of the twentieth century, Brucker, whose tenure as professor
of history from 1954 to 1991 spanned most of this period, realized how
much of the story was undocumented.

Discussion with Carroll Brentano (M.A. History, 1951, Ph.D.
History, 1967), coordinator of the University History Project at the
Center for Studies in Higher Education, history department faculty wife,
and a former graduate student in history, reinforced his perception that
a great deal of the history of the University and its academic culture
was not preserved for future generations. The Department of History,
where one might expect to find an abiding interest in preserving a
historical record, had discarded years of departmental files, and only a
fraction of history faculty members had placed their personal papers in
the Bancroft Library.1

Moreover, many of the most interesting aspects of the history—the
life experiences, cultural context, and personal perceptions—were only
infrequently committed to paper.2 They existed for the most part in the
memories of the participants.

Carroll Brentano knew of the longtime work of the Regional Oral
History Office (ROHO) in recording and preserving the memories of
participants in the history of California and the West and the special
interest of ROHO in the history of the University. She and Gene Brucker
then undertook to involve Ann Lage, a ROHO interviewer/editor who had
conducted a number of oral histories in the University History Series
and was herself a product of Berkeley's history department (B.A. 1963,
M.A. 1965). In the course of a series of mutually enjoyable luncheon

'The Bancroft Library holds papers from history professors Walton
Bean, Woodbridge Bingham, Herbert Bolton, Woodrow Borah, George
Guttridge, John Hicks, Joseph Levenson, Henry May, William Alfred
Morris, Frederic Paxson, Herbert Priestley, Engel Sluiter, Raymond
Sontag.

2Two published memoirs recall the Berkeley history department: John
D. Hicks, My Life with History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1968) recalls his years as professor and dean, 1942-1957; Henry F. May
reflects on his years as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the thirties in
Coming to Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

meetings, the project to document the history of the Department of
History at Berkeley evolved.

In initial discussions about the parameters of the project, during
which the varied and interesting lives of the history faculty were
considered, a crucial decision was made. Rather than conduct a larger
set of short oral histories focussed on topics limited to departmental
history, we determined to work with selected members of the department
to conduct more lengthy biographical memoirs. We would record relevant
personal background- -family, education, career choices, marriage and
children, travel and avocations; discuss other institutional
affiliations; explore the process of creating their historical works;
obtain reflections on their retirement years. A central topic for each
would be, of course, the Department of History at Berkeley—its
governance, the informal and formal relationships among colleagues, the
connections with the broader campus, and curriculum and teaching at both
the graduate and undergraduate level.

Using the Brucker lecture as a point of departure, it was decided
to begin to document the group of professors who came to the department
in the immediate postwar years, the 1950s, and the early 1960s. Now
retired, the younger ones somewhat prematurely because of a university
retirement incentive offer in the early nineties, this group was the one
whose distinguished teaching and publications initially earned the
Department of History its high national rating. They made the crucial
hiring and promotion decisions that cemented the department's strength
and expanded and adapted the curriculum to meet new academic interests.

At the same time, they participated in campus governing bodies as
the university dealt with central social, political, and cultural issues
of our times, including challenges to civil liberties and academic
freedom, the response to tumultous student protests over free speech,
civil rights and the Vietnam War, and the demands for equality of
opportunity for women and minorities. And they benefitted from the
postwar years of demographic and economic growth in California
accompanied for the most part through the 1980s with expanding budgets
for higher education. Clearly, comprehensive oral histories discussing
the lives and work of this group of professors would produce narratives
of interest to researchers studying the developments in the discipline
of history, higher education in the modern research university, and
postwar California, as well as the institutional history of the
University of California.

Carroll Brentano and Gene Brucker committed themselves to
facilitate the funding of the oral history project, as well as to enlist
the interest of potential memoirists in participating in the process.
Many members of the department responded with interest, joined the
periodic lunch confabs, offered advice in planning, and helped find
furdirg to support the project. In the spring of 1996, the interest of

ill

the department in its own history led to an afternoon symposium,
organized by Brentano and Professor of History Sheldon Rothblatt and
titled "Play It Again, Sam." There, Gene Brucker restaged his Faculty
Research Lecture. Professor Henry F. May responded with his own
perceptions of events, followed by comments on the Brucker and May
theses from other history faculty, all videotaped for posterity and the
Bancroft Library.1

Meanwhile, the oral history project got underway with interviews
with Delmer Brown, professor of Japanese history; Nicholas Riasanovsky,
Russian and European intellectual history; and Kenneth Stampp, American
history. A previously conducted oral history with Woodrow Borah, Latin
American history, was uncovered and placed in The Bancroft Library. An
oral history with Carl Schorske, European intellectual history, is in
process at the time of this writing, and more are in the works. The
selection of memoirists for the project is determined not only by the
high regard in which they are held by their colleagues, because that
would surely overwhelm us with candidates, but also by their willingness
to commit the substantial amount of time and thought to the oral history
process. Age, availability of funding, and some attention to a balance
in historical specialties also play a role in the selection order.

The enthusiastic response of early readers has reaffirmed for the
organizers of this project that departmental histories and personal
memoirs are essential to the unraveling of some knotty puzzles: What
kind of a place is this University of California, Berkeley, to which we
have committed much of our lives? What is this academic culture in
which we are enmeshed? And what is this enterprise History, in which we
all engage? As one of the project instigators reflected, "Knowing what
was is essential; and as historians we know the value of sources, even
if they are ourselves." The beginnings are here in these oral
histories .

Carroll Brentano, Coordinator

University History Project

Center for Studies in Higher Education

Gene Brucker

Shepard Professor of History Emeritus

Ann Lage, Principal Editor
Regional Oral History Office

'The Brucker lecture and May response, with an afterword by David
Hollinger, are published in History at Berkeley: A Dialog in Three Parts
(Chapters in the History of the University of California, Number Seven),
Carroll Brentano and Sheldon Rothblatt, editors [Center for Studies in
Higher Education rnd Institute of Governmental Studies, University of
California, Berkeley 1998].

March 2000

University History Series, Department of History at Berkeley

Series List

Brown, Delmer M. Professor of Japanese History, University of California,
Berkeley, 1946-1977. 2000, 410 pp.

May, Henry F. Professor of American Intellectual History, University of
California, Berkeley, 1952-1980. 1999, 218 pp.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Professor of Russian and European Intellectual
History, University of California, Berkeley, 1957-1997. 1998, 310 pp.

Schorske, Carl E. Intellectual Life, Civil Libertarian Issues, and the
Student Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, 1960-1969.
2000, 203 pp.

Stampp, Kenneth M. Historian of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,
University of California, Berkeley, 1946-1983. 1998, 310 pp.

In process:

Bouwsma, William J., professor of European cultural history
Smith, Thomas C., professor of Japanese history

INTRODUCTION by Irwin Scheiner

As a school child in New York City when sick with a bad cold or
worse, I was immediately sentenced to bed. One of the pleasures of
those days were long afternoons of listening to soap operas. Among my
favorites was "Our Gal Sunday": with great portentousness (and well
rounded vowels) the announcer asked, "Can a poor girl from a small
mining town in Montana find happiness married to Lord Henry Brinthrop,
England's most handsome and wealthy Lord?" Or something like that.

I capture, once again, much of my childhood delight and (the same)
astonishment when I look at Delmer Brown's life. How did a boy born in
Peculiar, Missouri, in 1909 become—well, become Delmer? Scholar or
administrator, in all of his enterprises, Delmer became an intrepid
adventurer. There has been, I think, in his character equal parts of
naivete and savvy, always intelligence, and an extraordinary degree of
curiosity and openness to new experience. In its best sense, then,
Delmer is an American of our mid-twentieth century.

How other than in this way can we understand the young Stanford
pre-law graduate applying for and accepting an appointment at one of
Imperial Japan's most prestigious "Higher Schools"? Arriving first in
Tokyo, Delmer trained across Honshu to the old castle town of Kanazawa
on the Japan Sea coast, the location of the school. Clad in the
suitable college garb of the mid-thirties (jaunty sport jacket and
loafers), Delmer lowered himself from the train, where he was met by the
entire upper administration of the school, also suitably garbed (tail
coats and grey trousers).

Within the year Delmer had become acclimated, deeply absorbed in
studying the language and then its history. I will not go into his
determined traveling about Japan (by bike and foot, train and bus); nor
his courtship of Mary Logan, who became Mary Brown, married to Delmer
and Japan, in spite of her desire (having lived most of her pre-college
life as a Japan missionaries' daughter) to live the remainder of her
life in the U.S.

Delmer 's return to Stanford to earn a Ph.D. in Japanese history
(ultimately completing a dissertation and then a book, Money Economy in
Medieval Japan) marked the beginning only of the scholarly half of his
career. (World War II gave him the opportunity to display his
extraordinary talent as an administrator, negotiator, and conciliator.
But more on that later.)

When I first met Delmer in 1963, he had just finished

cotranslating from Japanese a major work by Muraoka Tsunetsugu on Shinto
thought, had finished a collaboration ind translation with Ishida Ichiro

on Buddhism and aesthetics in pre-Tokugawa Japan, and had begun his
extraordinary collaboration with Ishida on the interpretation and
translation of the GukanshS , a major medieval interpretive historical
text. Our conversations in our early luncheon meetings ranged widely
over Japanese history. But for Delmer--possessed in all ways by kami,
the animistic spirits of Japan- -the route to understanding the Japanese
came through the analysis of their religions and, in particular, he
argued, through an understanding of the ways of these spirit /gods. Now
some thirty- five years after he began, he has not only edited but, in
fact, either translated or written a good part of the Cambridge History
volume on early Japanese history. His interpretive imprint now stands
powerfully to the forefront in any Western or Japanese interpretation of
Japanese history or the history of Japanese religion. The task he has
set himself is seemingly endless. Now as he reaches for his eighty-
ninth birthday, he has taken on the task of establishing a major center
for the study of Shinto at Berkeley.

However significant scholarship has been to Delmer, it has
absorbed only one half of his energy. Entering the navy shortly after
Pearl Harbor, Delmer was made an intelligence officer (reaching the rank
of lieutenant commander) and placed in charge of the naval Japanese
translating center at Pearl Harbor. Under his command he had as
brilliant and as eccentric a group of young men as one could imagine. I
am sure, from my later experience with him, he approached his task of
administering the unit with an absolute certainty that he could succeed
in organizing the most intractable of isolates and the most alienated of
poets .

Delmer 's mode of operation as an administrator, as I have seen it,
is always to give the impression of his openness to the opinion of
others (which, in fact, he is) and his willingness to negotiate on all
points (which he does do). These are winning points. They also reflect
his optimistic (and very American) belief that good people can always
talk out a problem. But what must also be pointed out is that his
openness does not reflect either muddleheadedness, wishy-washiness, or a
willingness to modify his strongly held opinions. At the end of any
negotiation or discussion to which I have been privy, Delmer has sweetly
but determinedly attained his objectives.

As these memoirs show, Delmer Brown has had and continues to have
a distinguished and memorable career as a scholar and academic
administrator. There are so few people that I know of whose life and
contributions can be described as memorable. Delmer 's are.

Irwin Scheiner
Professor of History

August, 1998
Berkeley, California

vii

INTERVIEW HI STORY --Delmer M. Brown

Delmer M. Brown, professor emeritus of Japanese history, spent his
entire academic career as a member of the UC Berkeley Department of
History, from 1946 to his retirement in 1977. As a young faculty member,
he was an observer of the loyalty oath controversy, 1949-1951, and a
participant in the "Young Turk" faculty revolt in the history department
in the mid-fifties. He twice served as chairman of the department
(1957-1961 and 1972-1975). As a leader of a moderate faculty group
during the campus unrest of the sixties and seventies, he helped shape
faculty and administration response to the student movement, as he
himself was influenced by student challenges to the status quo in
classroom teaching and campus politics. Throughout his career, Delmer
Brown took an active role in faculty governance on the Berkeley campus
and in the statewide University of California, through his leadership in
the Academic Senate where he was chair of the powerful Budget Committee
(1966-1967), chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate and
the statewide Representative Assembly (1971-1972), and a member of the
statewide Academic Council (1966-1967, 1971-1972).

At the same time, he has been for more than half a century a
leading scholar of Japanese history. He first encountered Japanese
culture as a recent graduate from Stanford University, when he went to
the Fourth Higher School in Kanazawa, Japan, to teach English from 1932
to 1938. His fascination with the language, culture, and history of
Japan began during those six years and led him back to Stanford for a
Ph.D. in Japanese history, received in 1946 following his wartime naval
service as an intelligence officer at Pearl Harbor. Since then, he has
spent several years of each decade in Japan, with the Asia Foundation in
the mid-fifties, as director of the California Abroad Program, 1967-1969
and 1992-1993, and as director of the Inter-University Center for
Japanese Language Studies, 1978-1988. In 1997, he was decorated by the
Emperor of Japan with the Order of the Sacred Treasure. He still
actively pursues his research and writing and continues his travels to
Japan as he enters his nineties.

As one of the most senior professors emeriti of history, with such
a distinguished career and active role in campus affairs, Delmer Brown
was a natural choice to inaugurate the Department of History at Berkeley
oral history series. Interviewing began on March 15, 1995, and
continued for six sessions, a total of fourteen hours, concluding on May
1, 1995. The transcript of the interview was lightly edited and sent to
Professor Brown for his review in November and December of 1995.

At this point, as sometimes occurs when a scholar accustomed to
research and writing confronts the transcript record of his oral
interview, Professor Brown treated the interview!; as a jumping off point:

viii

for a more thorough elucidation of the topics covered. He searched out
facts about Department of History hiring patterns and curriculum changes
and found Academic Senate records for events he remembered well but
could not date. He elaborated significantly on some topics,
particularly the sections in the latter half of the interview on his
directorships of the Inter-University Center and the California Abroad
Program, his scholarly work and relationships with Japanese historians,
and editorship of the first volume of the Cambridge History of Japan.

He gave a fuller account of his study and scholarly writings on
Shintoism, wrote about his family and travels, and elaborated on his
views on language study and the Education Abroad Program. All of this
was returned over the course of the next three years to the oral history
office on disk. It was obvious from the conversational tone of his
clear prose that he had kept in mind the suggestions accompanying the
original transcript: "We urge our narrators not to try to formalize the
conversational language of the interview." Professor Brown retained the
informal flavor of an interview in his extensive additions; when
necessary to keep the interview format, he added appropriate questions
for the interviewer.

The resulting document lies somewhere between an oral history and
a written memoir, but questions of genre are not as important to its
value as the richness of the information and the wealth of insights into
the life, work, and thought of Delmer Brown and the record of more than
thirty years of history of the Department of History and the Berkeley
campus .

Irwin Scheiner, professor of Japanese history who has known Delmer
as a colleague in the department since 1963, has written an introduction
to the oral history which makes clear Delmer 's importance as an
interpreter of Japanese history and the history of Japanese religion. He
also provides a snapshot of his ever-youthful, open, and optimistic
personal qualities which made him so effective as a faculty leader at
Berkeley. We thank Professor Scheiner for his thoughtful contribution.

On behalf of future scholars , we thank the Department of History
for providing the core funding to make this oral history series
possible, the Center for Japanese Studies for its contributions to the
Delmer Brown interview, and the various individual donors who are listed
on the acknowledgments page. Appreciation is due especially to Carroll
Brentano and Gene Brucker for initiating the series on the history of
the Department of History and for their ongoing efforts in planning and
securing support to continue it.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to record
the lives of persons who have contributed significantly to the history
of California and the West. A major focus of the office since its
inception has been university history. The series list of completed

oral histories documenting the history of the University of California
is included in this volume. The Regional Oral History Office is a
division of The Bancroft Library and is under the direction of Willa K.
Baum. Shannon Page and Sara Diamond provided editorial assistance in
preparing the Delmer Brown memoir.

Ann Lage
Interviewer /Editor

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
March 2000

Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library

University of California
Berkeley, California 94720

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I PERSONAL BACKGROUND AND EDUCATION, 1909-1932

[Interview 1: March 15, 1995] ttl

Family Background, Missouri and Kansas

Lage: This is our first interview about your scholarly career and the
history department and Japanese Studies at the university, and
about you. We are going to start at the beginning. I want you to
talk a little bit about your family and growing up in Kansas. It
seems like a long way from Kansas to Japan. We want to see how you
got there.

Brown: Well, my life started out not in Kansas but in Missouri. It is my
parents who were born in Kansas. My father went to Missouri, where
I was born, and I ended up in Kansas later on, after we lived in
Missouri.

Lage: And when were you born? Let's just get the facts.

Brown: I was born in 1909, November the twentieth. My father and mother
must have moved there two years before that, to a farm near a town
called Peculiar, Missouri.

Lage: Quite a name.

Brown: The story is that the people of this town wanted a peculiar name,
so they named it Peculiar.

Lage: That is wonderful. Tell me about your mother and father.

Brown: My mother and father were children of farmers who lived in

northeastern Kansas. They were farmers whose parents came from

'## This symbol indicates that a trpe or tape segment has begun or
ended. A guide to the tapes follows the t/anscript.

Illinois, apparently before the Civil War, in a migration that was
a big thing in the history of Kansas.

Lage: This migration from Illinois?

Brown: A migration from Illinois, settling in Kansas. It connected with
the North- South conflict about whether Kansas would become a free
or slave state.

Lage: There were groups from both sides. Which side did your parents
represent?

Brown: They came from Illinois, so they were on the northern side, the
free side. Kansas eventually became a free state.

Lage : What kind of an ethnic background did they come from?

Brown: I don't know. I think there is more German blood on my father's

side. There is also Irish and English. Both sides seem to go back
quite far.

Lage: Tell a little bit about growing up on a farm and what experiences
might have shaped some of your later qualities or interests.

Brown: Probably the greatest influence was that I somehow developed a

sense of confidence, because my father seemed to think I could do
anything as soon as I could walk. On the farm he had me doing
grown-up jobs quite early. I remember his tying me up to a harrow.
Do you know what a harrow is?

Lage: No.

Brown: A harrow has iron spikes that rake over freshly plowed soil to

break it up. A harrow was about ten feet long and six feet wide,
pulled by horses. I remember being tied on a box on top of the
harrow, driving a team of horses. I must have been seven or eight
years old.

Lage: Was that standard for a boy on the farm to do that kind of work?

Brown: I don't remember too much about neighbor children. Yes, I think
they were probably given responsibilities too. Although the
neighbors that I remember best were more into raising cattle than
wheat and corn, which was what my father produced mainly. Although
we had cows, most everything. I remember being given a job quite
early husking corn and getting cornstalks chopped up into fodder
and put into a silo.

Lage: The kinds of things that kids today wouldn't even know what you
were talking about.

Brown: You probably don't know about most of these things. That's right.
I have had nothing to do with such activities since the age of ten.
But I still remember them.

Lage:
Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

You were on the farm until ten. Then what happened?

Several interesting things happened before I left at the age of
ten. I remember going to Swope Park in Kansas City with my parents
for a Fourth of July celebration. That was a great occasion, not
only because of seeing Swope Park. I saw my first airplane then
and saw an airplane show with planes flying upside down--nose
diving and that sort of thing.

I remember the car that my father bought. It must have been
in about 1917. The first Model T car in the neighborhood. I
remember seeing him racing my cousin, who was driving a team of
horses. My father lost. I remember the horses passing the car
with great ease.

How did your dad happen to be the first person to buy a car?
he a more forward-looking person or better off?

Was

Maybe he was more successful financially. I don't know why. I
remember neighbors coming from some distance to see this new car.
We had to push it up the hill.

Those are fun memories. Not too many people go back to that kind
of memory. How about your mother? What was she like?

She was wonderful and thoughtful. Always gave us everything we
wanted. Like most loving mothers are, I think. Maybe more so.
She also was born in northeastern Kansas—that is where she and my
father met.

Lage: Did she encourage education or anything like that, that you can
remember?

Brown: Well, about education, neither of my parents went beyond high
school.

Lage: That wasn't unusual, certainly.

Brown: In the case of my father, he had three brothers who all went to

Kansas University. One, Uncle Orville, became a doctor in Phoenix.
Another, Uncle Herbert, was an engineer, and another, Uncle Guy,
owned a hardware store. Dad was the only one who dinn't go to

Lage:
Brown:
Lage:
Brown:

Lage:
Brown:

college. According to my grandmother, that was because he liked to
travel. He did travel a good deal.

After he got out of high school, he and a friend went on
horseback to the West. They got as far as Seattle and were gone
two years. According to his stories, whenever they ran out of
money they would get a job and work for a while. When he got home
after two years, he went the other direction, to Washington, D.C.
That time he went by train, not by horse, and attended the
inauguration of Teddy Roosevelt, which I think was in 1904.

After all that traveling he met Mother, and they got married.
I guess his father must have made it possible for him to buy a farm
south of Kansas City, at this place near Peculiar, Missouri.

He seems like a real enterprising young man.

He was enterprising. He was always doing strange things.

Doing strange things, you said?

I mean, he did odd things nobody else would do. Maybe that was why
he had to have that Model T Ford, just to be doing something
different. Traveling and doing things differently. That's, I
guess, why we moved away. He got bored, maybe, with farming. I
don't know what it was. He sold the farm at a good time, in 1919
when land prices were high. Then with the money, he bought a
hardware store in Kansas, so we moved to Kansas.

So that's when you got to Kansas?

Right. We returned to Overland Park, which is in the suburbs of
Kansas City, Kansas, or was then. I guess it is a part of Kansas
City, Kansas, now. We lived there for six years.

What do you remember about that?
your life?

Did that bring a big change in

I remember most the things that my father would allow me to do.
Such as, run the hardware store when he was on buying trips to
Kansas City, even though I was maybe no more than fourteen or
thirteen years old. He even allowed me to drive a car when I was
twelve years old. We had no such things as driver's licenses in
those days. We were out in the country, and there was no traffic
problem.

When he saw that I was cranking up the car one day- -we had to
crank it in those days—he suggested that I just drive it. If I
can crank ft, I ought to be able to drive it. And I did. I drove

a lot after that. Not too long afterward, the high school
basketball team wanted to borrow his truck. He said that they
could have it with one condition. That I, Delmer, would drive it
and nobody else.

Lage: So he had more faith in you than this other group of kids.
Brown: Exactly.

Lage: You had a brother, I guess, who died young. Was he a younger
brother?

Brown: That was Clarence, who was eighteen months younger than I. Shortly
after we moved to Kansas, he got spinal meningitis and died rather
quickly. It was a big shock to us all.

Lage: I can imagine. It must have been hard on your mother and your
father.

Brown: Oh, yes. After that he even stopped going to church for some
years.

Lage: Did he talk about that, why he stopped going to church?

Brown: Yes. He asked: Where was God? I think his despair over the death
of Clarence made him even doubt that there was a God.

Lage: And he did go back to it?

Brown: He did go back to it.

Lage: What religion was the family?

Brown: We were Methodists in those Missouri days. That's about the only
kind of church around. We used to go to church every Sunday, even
in cold winter. When it was way below zero we would go, pulled by
horses on a sled.

Lage: The car couldn't get through.

Brown: That was even before we had the car. He would take a buggy, remove
the wheels and make it into a sled, and we would go to church in
it.

Lage: It was an important part of your family life?
Brown: It was and continued to be all through their lives.

Lage: What about politics in your family? Did you hear talk of politics
around the dinner table?

Brown: I heard a lot about politics. My father originally was a

Republican but usually voted Democratic. In the thirties he was a
great supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and others who were more
radical than Roosevelt. So radical that when I got into the navy
and was being investigated, my mother tried to keep the
investigators away from my father. She was sure that he would say
something that would get me into trouble.

Lage: How interesting. I wonder what experiences that he had that turned
him--

Brown: He did a good deal of reading, although he never went to college.

He did more reading, I think, than his brothers. Especially in the
thirties, in the depression days. People were upset about economic
and social conditions in the country. He kept reading and
wondering what should be done and why they didn't do it.

I remember going on trips with him back to Kansas after we
moved to California. He was constantly talking to everybody that
we bought gasoline from, trying to find out what they thought about
the political situation, what they thought ought to be done. So he
had a continuing interest in political affairs and got pretty
deeply involved in some political activities. He was especially
interested in the cooperative movement and actually established
some cooperative branches in California after we moved there.

Lage: During the days of the twenties when the economic situation was
better, before you left Kansas, was he Republican? A Teddy
Roosevelt Republican?

Brown: He was a Republican in those days. He was not that much upset or
involved in political activities then. It was after the thirties
that he really got involved.

Lage: What about things like women's suffrage? You were pretty young
when that came about, but do you remember talk about that? Did
your mother vote?

Brown: I don't remember talking about such things. One thing I do
remember from the twenties is the Ku Klux Klan.

Lage: Oh, in Kansas.

Brown: My parents weren't involved in that, but we heard a good deal about
it. I think maybe the anti-Catholic position of the Ku Klux Klan
movement may have had some infl .en<-.e on my father. Lie seemed to be

against Catholics. As a matter of fact, I tried to borrow the car
once because I wanted to date a Catholic girl. He wouldn't let me
have it.

Lage: Oh, my goodness. I guess that wasn't too unusual in Protestant,
midwestern culture.

Brown: I suppose fairly common in those days. I just don't know.

Lage: Is there more we should talk about the hardware store or the Kansas
life before we find out why you came to California?

Brown: I was telling somebody the other day one thing I remember of that
Kansas period, I don't know how much of an influence it had on me,
maybe some. I was locked behind jail doors once. That was because
my father went to the bank one day when it was robbed. I was with
him that day, but I wasn't in the bank. I stayed in the store or
somewhere while he was there . He was asked to go to the county
jail to see whether he could identify the robbers among the persons
who were in jail. He took me along. When he went inside the jail,
he asked if I couldn't go along with him. So I was locked in there
with him as we were looking at the inmates. It was an experience
which I will not forget. I even remember the looks on the faces of
these men because they, I think, understood what was going on.

Lage: So it made an impact.

Brown: It did.

Lage: Do you think your father did that for a reason?

Brown: Well, maybe he wanted to keep me out of jail. I don't know. I
never did ask him--I should have asked.

Lage: He sounds like a person who let experience be your teacher instead
of moralizing about things, from what you say.

Brown: It might very well be, yes.

Move to California, 1925

Lage: How did you get out to California, and why?

Brown: My father went to California to visit some relatives, to visit his
brother, who was living in Phoenix. Also, a sister of my mother
who was living in Santa Ana, in California. He went during the

winter. Came back in January, as I recall. When I saw him getting
off the train, the snow was six or seven feet deep, very cold and
windy. As he came down the steps he said, "We are going to
California." By the next summer he had sold the hardware store and
our house and we were on our way to California, where we stayed.

Lage: Was that an unusual move at the time, or were other people finding
out about California?

Brown: After getting to California, we discovered there were a lot of

people from Kansas and other parts of the Middle West who had moved
there. But from our neighborhood in Kansas I know of no one else
who did that.

Lage: So this was a pretty adventuresome move?

Brown: I think it was really a decision suddenly made after being in
California in the winter.

Lage: Can't say that I blame him. Where did you end up in California?

Brown: At Santa Ana, in Orange County.

Lage: You must have seen a lot of orange groves in those days.

Brown: Many orange groves in those days. As a matter of fact, when we
were back there for a visit, my wife Mary said it was so easy to
get lost in Orange County because everywhere you went you saw
nothing but orange trees. On the right and on the left and
straight ahead was nothing but orange trees. That's not true now.

Lage: No. Now when we think Orange County, we think politics, right-wing
politics.

Brown: Exactly.

Lage: Then you thought of orange trees.

High School in Orange County

Lage: What was it like? Was it a big cultural change?

Brown: It was a big shock for me, especially going to school. I had gone
to a high school in Kansas that had maybe thirty or forty students.
In Santa Ana, it was a thousand students and I didn't know a single

one of them. My classes were big.
different teacher.

Every class was taught by a

Lage: Seems like a big school to be out there in the middle of all these
orange groves .

Brown: Santa Ana is the county seat of Orange County, and it is the

biggest city there. It was an agricultural town. We had our banks
and everything. It was a fairly large town. I don't know what the
population was, but I know they had around a thousand students,
which seemed enormous. I met another student wandering around the
hall, Neil Hall from Nebraska. It turned out that we were not only
lost and confused but had a common interest in basketball.

Lage: Midwestern basketball.

Brown: We played a lot of basketball in Kansas and Nebraska. So we

decided to go out for the basketball team. Although we went out
for what is called the Class C team, which is limited to boys of
about one hundred and ten pounds in weight, there were forty who
wanted to play basketball for this Class C team. All the players
seemed to know each other. They had gone to the same junior high
school together. So when they started choosing up teams, the two
of us were the last to be chosen. Nobody knew anything about us.
But since we had played basketball, we soon were promoted, and
ended up on the first team.

Lage: So basketball was kind of a continuing interest?

Brown: It was. As a matter of fact, it really helped me to get adjusted
to that new situation. Our team was able to defeat most teams in
southern California, so we got on the sports page and became known
around school. That gave us confidence and gave us friends. We
even got into school politics.

Lage: Did you run for office?

Brown: Oh, yes. Class president, as I recall, either in the junior year
or the senior year.

Lage: You made the adjustment quite well.

Brown: Well, it was not only an adjustment through basketball, but classes
were a problem because they were huge, forty or fifty students in
one class. A very scary situation. One of the first experiences I
remember was in a history class where the teacher wanted us to
report on something we had read in the newspapers. Most of the
students would take a very short item and give a very short
summary. Being a newcomer and an outsider, I took this assignment

seriously and selected a long article out of the Sunday newspaper
and wrote a paper that the teacher was really happy about and read
it to the class. That sort of got me off the ground, academically.
Also in geometry I did pretty well.

In Kansas I had been in an east Kansas contest in Latin and
algebra. I had somehow gained confidence in those fields. So
geometry was no problem. Because of success in classes like that,
I got on the honor roll and stayed on it, as well as played
basketball. I was busy.

Lage: You were. You were one of these well-rounded Calif ornians.
Brown: Maybe California made me that way.

Lage: Did you like it when you moved out? Did you like the change in the
weather?

Brown: Yes, I liked everything. I remember that my first view of the

ocean was somewhat scary, when we first arrived in California. I
don't know what it was. It made me dizzy, just looking at the
ocean. Such great expanse. I still remember that dizzy feeling
when looking at that huge ocean.

Lage: I think scholarly is not the right word when you are talking about
high school, but were these intellectual pursuits important to you,
or were you just excelling as one does?

Brown: I was interested in them. This goes back to Kansas again. I had a
teacher there, a Miss Harrison. She stimulated my interest in
learning more than any other teacher that I have had since than,
except for maybe one or two others. I don't know what it was about
her. She somehow got me looking into things and being interested
in learning and doing well at it. I don't know how she did it.
But I seemed to be excited because I knew she would be excited with
me. When I went back to Kansas later on, I went to see her. I was
already teaching at Cal at that time. She was interested that I
had become a teacher, but she was more interested in knowing
whether or not I had gotten a Ph.D. degree.

Lage: She was pretty impressed with that?

Brown: She apparently had worked in that direction herself, and she
therefore appreciated having a student who had made it .

Lage: It is kind of nice to think that you got back to tell her that she
had been important to you.

Methodist Church Youth Group

Lage: You also mentioned in some of the material that you gave me the
youth group at church being an important part of your life.

Brown: It was. This was in Santa Ana. Back in Santa Ana we again went to
the Methodist church, the whole family. There was a pastor there
by the name of Dr. Warmer. I don't know what his first name was.
I never got that well acquainted with him, but my father was a
great admirer. Dr. Warmer was quite liberal. I think that was one
of the reasons my father liked him. He was liberal politically as
well as religiously.

Then I got into the young people's group, Epworth League I
think they called it in the Methodist church. Dr. Warmer's son,
George, was in my class at Santa Ana High School. George did not
play basketball. He was a quarterback on the football team. We
became good friends and went to a conference at Asilomar, for
example, together. I think this was after we had gotten out of
high school and were in junior college.

We met Dr. Brooks at Asilomar, who impressed us both. We used
to take walks with him and to talk with him about religious and
philosophical questions. Both of us became so impressed by Dr.
Brooks that we wanted to go to Pomona and study under him. We
actually went to Pomona to see if we liked it.

Pomona College

Lage: Is this the Pomona College?

Brown: Yes. We were in junior college at the time. Most people at junior
college were planning to transfer to a university. So we went over
to Pomona to see if we would like to go there. George did go and
did study under Brooks and became a pastor. He went on to seminary
and later became a pastor of the First Methodist Church in Oakland,
and even vice president of Boston University. I didn't go to
Pomona. I wanted to go to Stanford.

Lage: Were you thinking at the time of studying to be a minister?

Brown: I may have been thinking a bit about it. I was thinking more about
becoming a doctor. My uncle, my father's eldest brother who was in
Phoenix, had no sons, and when we visited him--I think this was
when I WF s still in high school—he said that I could take over his

practice if I became a doctor. I began thinking about that, and
maybe that was what I was thinking about at that time.

Lage: Did you like the sciences? Did you take a lot of biology and--

Brown: That was one of the reasons I backed out of medicine. I did take a
course in zoology when I was in junior college. Somehow, I didn't
take to that. The thing that bugged me most was trying to draw
pictures of animal organs that I couldn't see. Even in the
microscope I couldn't see them, so how could I draw pictures of
them? Anyway, I think I was turned off finally when I got to
Stanford. One of my fraternity brothers, who was going into
medicine, had a skull with him one day. He was memorizing all the
bones in the inner ear, hundreds of them. I thought that was not
for me. That was when I decided not to go into medicine.

Lage: After you got to Stanford. I seem to remember that some of your
interest in the Far East started in the junior college.

Brown: In Santa Ana, it did. I had two teachers at Santa Ana who had a

great deal of influence on me. One was a philosophy teacher by the
name of Dr. Nealy. When I first had the urge to go to Japan, I
went to him for advice. I was really troubled about the amount of
money that it would take to go to Japan and China. I remember Dr.
Nealy saying, "You can't waste money on education." He, in a
sense, was urging me to go ahead, even though it was costly. I
didn't accept his advice, but I retained a great admiration for
him.

Lage: This was an opportunity you had at the junior college?

Brown: There was another teacher, Dean Fisk, who was actually a teacher of
business law, but had a great interest in the Far East. Every
summer he would take students with him on a trip to Japan and
China. He did that for several successive years. The first year
that I was in junior college, I met and became good friends of
several who had gone to the Far East with Dean Fisk. I got
interested in going, but didn't make it.

Lage: It just seemed too expensive?

Brown: It was too expensive. Expense was a big item at that point because
I had decided I wanted to go to Stanford, not Pomona, which was
probably the most expensive place on the coast to go. My father,
being a practical type, saw no reason why I should go to an
expensive place when I could go to a state university like UCLA.

Lage: Or Berkeley.

Brown: Yes. He said that if I wanted to go to Stanford, I could pay my
own bill, and that he wasn't going to help me. I went anyway. I
was as independent as he was.

Stanford University. 1930-1932 tt

Lage: I am curious about why Stanford?
Brown: Why I wanted to go to Stanford?
Lage: Right.

Brown: It was mainly because in southern California, Stanford was a famous
university. You heard more about Stanford than any other
university. I suppose that may still be true, but I am not sure.

Lage: My father, who was very much your vintage from southern California,
came to Berkeley.

Brown: I had other friends who went to Berkeley. As a matter of fact—and
this story goes back to that church experience again—we had a so-
called deputation team in Santa Ana, made up of young men
associated with the church who got together and gave services at
various churches. In that group was the George Warmer I just
mentioned. There were two others: Bill Hewett and Bob Reinhard who
both went to Cal and later became professors there. Bob Reinhard
became a medical doctor and was later a dean at the San Francisco
medical school. Bill Hewett taught at Davis in some field of
agriculture.

Lage: Interesting.

Brown: Out of that group I was the only one that went to Stanford.

Lage: Something attracted you to Stanford.

Brown: I guess it was just its reputation.

Lage: Did you go up to visit?

Brown: Yes, I think I visited before I went, although I may have seen it
for the first time after I was admitted. I can't be sure about
that.

Lage: You were thinking of medicine at that time?

Brown: Medicine for a while, for a very short while. Then, I began to

gravitate toward law. I think maybe the interest in that also got
started under Dean Fisk. In class one day, he asked us if any of
us was planning on getting into politics. Nobody was, or if they
were, they didn't admit it. He deplored that and pointed out that
there ought to be more people with a sense of responsibility taking
an interest in politics. It was also clear from what he said, and
others said, that if you are going to go into politics, law was the
path to take. I think maybe that was why I shifted to law.
Actually, my major programs at Stanford were in the field of
political science, economics, and history, courses one should take
to prepare oneself for entrance to law school.

Lage: I just want to finish up with southern California and your family
before we get you into Stanford. What did your father do after he
moved out here?

Brown:

Lage:

He really didn't do anything. He built a house for us, to begin
with. He did most of the work himself. It was a very nice home.
Then he sold that and bought five acres of land west of Santa Ana.
Then the Depression came. We were stuck out there on West Fifth
Street. He tried to buy a hardware store. He scouted around a
good deal looking for a hardware store. He never really found one
that was what he wanted. He also took a job once that lasted only
just two or three weeks. I think he started telling the boss how
to run his business, or something like that. He is not one to take
orders, let's put it that way. Anyway, that didn't last.

In a sense he never did work. He retired around the age of
forty, as it turned out, when he left Kansas. Fortunately, he had
made enough money in Overland Park to live. He had bought a garage
and a motion picture theater, as well as the hardware store. When
we went to California, he still had the theater and the garage. So
he just stuck it out without working.

That's always nice if you can do it.
hard?

Did the Depression hit him

Brown: He couldn't move. He couldn't make any more money during that
period. It was a bit hard.

Lage: This was right when you were deciding to go to Stanford. You went
to Stanford in 1930.

Brown: That's right. That's one of the reasons why he wasn't going to

support me if I wanted to go to Stanford; he really couldn't afford
to. That is one of the reasons.

Lage: Okay, that gives us a little background. I think entering into
college on the eve of the Depression--it gives you kind of a
special outlook.

Brown: Yes, I entered Stanford in 1930, and the Depression had hit before
that. At Stanford you didn't get much of a sense of the
Depression, because most of the others there had plenty of money.
I got into a fraternity, I think again for economic reasons. That
was a good way to get a job. They wanted me to come into the
fraternity and were willing to give me the job of hashing, which
paid my board and room. That was one of the reasons I went into
this fraternity. When I got in, I discovered almost all the others
had a car. Not only a car, but a nice car. Several had a
Hupmobile sports car.

Most of the others in the fraternity were from pretty well-off
families. One of them was Mike Sutro, who was a good friend of
mine. He became a lawyer, but I have lost track of him. He was
probably the wealthiest. His mother would come down in a big car
with a driver to visit him once in a while. He was however dressed
in cords and drove an old beat-up Ford convertible, acting pretty
much like the rest of us .

Lage: Was it hard for you to have to be scrambling to put yourself
through school and be in the midst of--

Brown: It wasn't hard. As a matter of fact it was rather easy, I thought.
Not only did I get board and room at the fraternity house for doing
relatively little work, I got a few other jobs. When football time
came, I got a job at the hot dog stands and became manager of about
half of them at the time of a big game. I would make as much as
ten dollars a day, which was extra. It would allow me to go into
the city [San Francisco] for dances. I thought it worked out
pretty well, although I went into debt for my tuition. In those
days, if you had a 'B' average you could borrow your tuition at no
interest, and you could pay it back whenever you had the money.

Lage: They didn't have scholarships but they had long-
Brown: They had some scholarships but, well, this was called a tuition
scholarship, I think. I didn't have that much trouble
economically. Maybe it was because I was one of the few who had to
work for a living.

Lage: Not too much competition for the jobs.
Brown: Right. [laughter]

Developing an Interest in the Far East

Lage: What do you remember about Stanford in terms of shaping your
interests, professors that were important?

Brown: Since I had developed this interest in the Far East under Dean
Fisk--

Lage: And you had a real interest?

Brown: I had a real interest at that time. That interest was further

stimulated by a good friend by the name of Fred Humiston, who lives
here in Waterford [at Rossmoor] right now. Fred Humiston was in
high school with me. He went on one of these trips to the Far East
with Dean Fisk. That was in 1930, I think. He also went to
Stanford, and we were in the same fraternity house and often roomed
together. I saw his pictures and heard his stories about his trip
to the Far East. I suppose it was because of that I even took two
courses on the Far East. One was a course in Far Eastern
diplomatic history from Payson J. Treat.

Lage: He is a famous name.

Brown: When time came for graduation, I thought it would be nice to do a
little traveling before going into law school. My friend Fred
Humiston suggested that I try to get a teaching job in Japan. When
he was in Japan on that summer tour, he had met a young man by the
name of Ronald Anderson who had gone to Stanford and was teaching
English in Tokyo. He had Ronald Anderson's address and suggested
that I write him, which I did. Ronald was then teaching at
Kanazawa in western Japan and wrote back immediately saying that he
was moving to another school and, as far as he knew, nobody had
applied for his job in Kanazawa. He told me what I should do if I
wanted to apply, which I did. 1 ended up with a contract with the
Ministry of Education of Japan to teach in the Kanazawa Fourth
Higher School for three years.

Lage: Had you taken any Japanese language?

Brown: No Japanese language. They didn't even teach Japanese at Stanford
in those years. They had a Japanese professor, but I wasn't
interested that much in Japan at that point. They hired me in
Japan not because I knew Japanese but because I could teach
English.

Lage: You knew English.

Brown: They assumed that, since I had graduated from Stanford, I knew

enough English to teach their students. I accepted this job for
three years. If you didn't take it for three years, you couldn't
get travel to and from Japan.

Lage: They paid your way?

Brown: They paid my way over and gave me housing. That is another reason
why I was not that much upset by the Depression. I had this job in
Japan for six years during the Depression years and was paid very
well. I not only had travel to and from Japan but a three-bedroom
house, rent free. I had a live- in cook and maid and also a student
interpreter. I got the fabulous salary of four hundred yen a
month, which will buy you a newspaper in Tokyo now.

Lage: But what did it buy then?

Brown: It had great buying power then. I used to say and believe that a
yen in those days had about the buying power of a dollar.
Actually, on the exchange rate it was much lower, but I remember
saying that what I could get with a yen in Japan was about what I
could get with a dollar in the United States. It was not that much
different.

Lage: What did your parents think of your taking off to Japan?

Brown: My father said he couldn't understand why I should want to go to

"that God- forsaken place." That is the way he put it. [laughing]
He was more or less against it. As a matter of fact, he was
against almost everything I did. He was against my going to
Stanford. He was against my going to Japan. He wasn't against my
going into the navy; couldn't help that. But he was against my
leaving the navy when the war was over. He thought I should have
stayed on. The salary was pretty good. I opposed him on a number
of--

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

He sounds as if he was supportive of you in your early life,
he not? Was he critical?

Was

This Depression, I think, did have this effect on him. It not only
made it harder for him to make money and to live, it made him much
more critical of anything that I did that might cost money.

How about your mother?
Japan?

What did she think about your going off to

I don't know. Most anything I wanted to do was fine with her.
[laughter] Although my dad wouldn't support me when I went to
Stanford, she was always sending me a little money on the side.

Lage: I was just curious about that, whether they thought that was a
little bizarre that you would take off to the Far East.

Brown: My father thought it was — foolish, I guess that is the way he might
have put it. Again, because it was not settling down and getting a
regular job.

Lage: You were doing well, financially.

Brown: Quite well. He was interested in traveling in his earlier days,
but somehow going to, as he called it, "that God-forsaken place"
didn't appeal to him. He didn't see why it would appeal to me.

II TEACHING IN JAPAN, 1932-1938

Arrival and Getting Settled

Lage: So, we have you to Japan. Are you ready to shift into that area
and think about six years in Japan and what you saw?

Brown: Fine. The cultural shock of going to Santa Ana High School was
something, but going to Japan was something else. I guess maybe
the thing that in my memory reflects the shock about as much as
anything was getting off of the train in Kanazawa where I was to
teach--it turned out for six years instead of three. When I got
off the train--

Lage: How far is Kanazawa from Tokyo?

Brown: It is on the opposite side of the island from Tokyo. It is on the
Japan Sea side facing Siberia. Right on the Japan Sea, about five
miles from the Japan Sea. When I got off the train, I was dressed
like a Stanford student would be dressed, with cords and a green
shirt, solid green shirt. Here on the station platform were about
thirty men in morning suits, lined up and bowing--to me! I was the
new foreign teacher, and they were all the teachers there to
welcome me, in style. That is, in the proper way, formally dressed
with morning suits and bowing to me.

Lage: This must have thrown you?

Brown: It threw me. I really felt quite self-conscious about it.

Lage: Nobody prepared you. Did you talk to the young man that you
replaced?

Brown: I was somewhat prepared because Ronald Anderson was with me. He

went there and was with me for a day or two. He was on the train.
He told me a few things. But he didn't--! don't think that even he
realized that all these teachers would be at the platform to

welcome me. Just one thing after another was so different and
startling that it was hard to get used to.

I moved into this house. The maid that Ronald had already
hired, and which I kept, was both maid and cook. She did all the
housework too. She lived in. I paid her the fabulous sum of
twenty- five yen a month out of my four hundred. She did
everything, all the house cleaning and the cooking and so on, and
was there all the time. I couldn't communicate with her. She
didn't know any English. That was a problem. Just to get hot
water to shave was impossible because I didn't know what the words
were. I had to start studying Japanese.

Lage: Had Ronald learned Japanese while he was there?

Brown: He had. He had been there three years so he was pretty good in

Japanese. But he soon disappeared. He had to go to his own job.
This student who was to help me as my interpreter went with me one
day to the department store to get a haircut. I realized that this
haircut was going to be somewhat tedious and long. I suggested
that he go off and do whatever he wanted to. I would go home by
myself. The haircut itself was kind of a shocker.

Lage: You mean the styling?

Brown: The way they do it. They give you a massage and everything for
twenty- five yen. I remember the price too. Anyway, when I got
through that, I started home and got lost. I had in my pocket an
address, written out in Roman letters, where I lived. Everybody
that I approached about getting home couldn't read that, and they
couldn't understand it when I read it. I was really lost. I was
finally able to get home because I was helped by two students
dressed in student uniforms. I guessed that they were students of
the school where I would be teaching, and they guessed that I was
their new foreign teacher, since there was only one. They
practically led me home by the hand.

It turned out that all of the students had studied a lot of
English but their conversational ability was very low. Therefore,
they couldn't really understand anything I would say, and I
couldn't understand what they were saying. They managed to get me
home. It became necessary to learn some language to survive in
that place, and I got busy at it right away.

Lage: I can imagine. What an experience. How big a place was Kanazawa?

Brown: About a hundred thousand people. Very big city back then. It is
bigger than that now. It was comparable to the capital of a state
in this country. It was the capital of a prefectu -e.

Lage: How did your dress change? Did you conform?

Brown: I soon got myself a suit and dressed properly. I got rid of my
cords and haven't used any since. I began to dress like the
teachers dressed, with a suit and a tie.

Lage: But not a morning coat? That was for a special-
Brown: Whenever we went to a ceremony. I had to buy a morning suit

because we had ceremonies at the school on the Emperor's birthday
and at various other times during the year. When those occasions
came, I had to dress in a morning suit.

Lage: So you conformed to that?

Brown: I had to conform in a lot of little ways.

The Classroom, Basketball, and Social Life

Lage:

Brown:

How about the experience in the classroom?
from what you had been accustomed to?

Was that very different

That was a shocker, too. We had about thirty-five students in each
class. Every student was dressed in exactly the same way with the
same uniform, always a black uniform with brass buttons up around
the collar. They would have a black hat with a white rim around
it, and the school emblem on its front. They always had a white
towel hanging from their right hip pocket, which they used for
various purposes. When I would go into the classroom I would see
all these faces, all with black hair, all about the same height,
same complexions, same uniform.

When I went into a classroom, the students would all stand up,
and they would remain standing until I got to the podium and bowed,
and then they would return the bow and sit down. I always had to
take roll call. Somewhere along the line I got the urge to know
their names, which were all strange to me. I worked on memorizing
the names of the students in my class in order to take roll call
without looking at the book. That took a lot of work. I always
had a poor memory for names, but I worked so hard on this that I
got so I could call out the names of all students in all classes
without looking at the book.

Lage: You had more than one class.

Brown: I had five or six classes. That really paid off. They were

impressed that I could do that. And the teachers were impressed.
I even had teachers come to ask me the name of a certain student
third from the front row on the left side. I would be able to tell
them. That really impressed them. It paid off to do that.

Lage: Were these all boys?

Brown: All boys, no girls.

Lage: Did the girls go to school then elsewhere?

Brown: Yes. The classrooms were all the same, very simple, with a desk
and a stove in front, a coal stove which would be started only on
the first of November. No matter how cold it was in October, they
would have no coal for the stove. On November the first they would
get some. I can remember that most of them seemed not to wear
shoes but geta- -wooden clogs. I still remember these bare feet
sticking out in front of their desks as I would walk into the
classrooms on the coldest days. Also I could see that many of them
had chilblains. So there was a lot of discomfort. It was cold
there. In the winter the snow would usually get six feet deep or
so. These students would have no socks on, and the stove was not
always that warm.

Lage: And in October it wasn't at all.

Brown: That's right. That was kind of shocking.

Lage: And the kind of respect accorded you when you are just out of
college must have taken you aback.

Brown: It was. I was about their age, maybe a year or two older than they
were. I had just gotten out of Stanford. Their school was
comparable to a junior college in this country.

Lage: I see. So you were only a few years older?

Brown: Yes. They didn't respect me for my age. I didn't have grey hair
at that time. All you could say was that I was their teacher. In
that country, somehow, that made a difference. They treated me
accordingly. We did have some interests in common. Because I was
about their age and had an interest in basketball. They soon
discovered this. So I went out and practiced with the basketball
team.

Lage: So they played basketball, too?

Brown: They had swimming, tennis, and basketball teams, as well as teams

in various Japanese sports. When playing with the basketball team,
I tried to teach them things that they were not that much into,
such as feinting, fast dribbling, passing, et cetera. When
drilling them on throwing hard, I got myself into a hardball
contest with one of the biggest and strongest players. I won
because I had learned to throw a ball with a spin that could not be
caught. [laughing] On the last day I played with them, for some
reason, I took a long shot at the basket from midcourt and it went
in. They were amazed, and so was I. And that was the last day I
have played basketball. [laughter]

Lage: Why did you quit?

Brown: I don't know. I guess I figured I couldn't do any better than
that. I just thought that was a good note on which to end.

Lage: You could have started coaching them and taken them right to the
championship.

Brown: I had done that for a while. But I got into other things.
Lage: You were busy?

Brown: I was busy, and I had a lot of other interests. As a matter of

fact, that was one of the things that puzzled them about me. When
they get into a sport, they stick to that, specializing in it and
dropping everything else. Whereas I had more general interests. I
also went out for swimming. I went to the pool and did some
swimming and diving. I did a lot of other things, such as playing
Mah-Jongg with the teachers and so on.

Lage: How did you get a social life going with these rudimentary Japanese
skills?

Brown: My social life was quite limited. I did play Mah-Jongg with the
teachers and went on hikes with them.

Lage: Did the teachers speak some English?

Brown: In addition to me, there were about eight Japanese teachers who
taught English. It was primarily with them that I associated.

Lage: How was their English?

Brown: Terrible.

Lage: They were probably glad to have the time with you.

Brown: It was a problem. They had studied their English in Japan. Many
had studied it at the university level and gotten rather deep into
such things as Shakespeare and Chaucer. But their conversation was
definitely limited. They had a great vocabulary. What they taught
was English translation. They would take some English text,
something really difficult, from Emerson or some other famous
author. That would be the textbook for the class. They would
translate it into Japanese page by page, paragraph by paragraph.
Usually no more than a page was covered in one class session.
Every student would be able to understand that page and understand
every word on the page and would be examined on it later. That is
the way they taught English.

The teachers were coming to me frequently to get me to explain
a particular word or phrase. Often very difficult things, but
sometimes quite simple. One teacher was interested in translating
a song on a record that he had purchased. He came across the words
"and how!" in the song, and there was no question mark after "how".
Why is that? It was questions like that they asked.

Lage: That would be a hard one to explain.

Brown: That is a hard one. They had a lot of questions that were hard.

Usually within a short time, maybe a year or two, they were talking
to me in Japanese. Even the English teachers.

Learning Japanese

Lage: So your Japanese—you must have learned it relatively quickly?

Brown: I had to pick it up, as I say, to survive. I studied it. I worked
on it pretty hard. I had a tutor once or twice a week. Then I had
to use it all the time just to get around. I started reading it,
too. I went through elementary school textbooks in Japanese. I
worked on it pretty hard. That's why I stayed on for another three
years. During the first three years I had begun to make some
headway on the language and felt that I should stay longer and get
into it more deeply.

Lage: Did you teach English in your classes the same way that the
Japanese taught it?

Brown: No, no. I would have a text but used various methods for different
classes. It was supposed to be oral English, speaking. They
wanted me to teach them how to speak, to understand spoken English.

Lage: Was it oral English?

Brown: Yes, at the beginning it was mostly oral. That is, I would choose
a text, and after they had read it, we would talk about it.

Lage: They weren't beginning students?

Brown: No, they had been studying English, on the average, seven or eight
years before they got into my classes.

Lage: So they had a lot of background, but not in conversation.

Brown: They had had the kind of teaching their Japanese teachers were

giving them, even in junior-high and senior-high schools. Before
they got into this Fourth Higher School, they had studied English
for at least five years. In some cases they would have had a
foreign teacher, but not often. They had a big vocabulary. If I
would write a word on the blackboard, they would get it. So I did
a lot of writing on the blackboard. Key words of anything I had to
say had to be written on the blackboard.

Later on, I discovered what they really needed more than oral
English was the ability to translate from Japanese into English.
In other words, to write English. I spent more and more time
teaching that, which gave me the opportunity to learn more written
Japanese. I first had them read the Japanese that they were trying
to translate; and I had to find out what the original meant. I
learned a lot of Japanese in that kind of teaching.

Lage: Were you also learning a lot about Japanese culture and their
values?

Brown: Yes, this is why I became interested in Japanese studies, just

living there and being shocked by all these cultural differences.
I began to ask myself questions about why they did this and why
they did that. Questions were coming up all the time.

Maeda Toshiie Diary Translations

Brown: For example, when I walked to school in those days, I regularly
passed a fascinating statue that must have been more than twenty
feet high. Since I could not read the Chinese characters engraved
on it, I had no idea who was represented. But the subject soon
came up in my classes, and I learned from my students that it was a

Lage:
Brown:

statue of Maeda Toshiie [1538-1599], founder of the Maeda clan
whose heads were daimyS of Kaga throughout the Edo period [ 1603-
1868]. The statue was located in a garden, one of Japan's three
most famous castle gardens. Called the Kenroku Park, it probably
had been built near the entrance to the castle in the seventeenth
century.

Now

you have to tell me what a daimyo is .

A daimyo was a great military lord who ruled over an area usually
made up of one or more provinces. Every daimyo had a castle, which
was the center and base of his control. On my way to and from
school, I had to walk by that statue of a famous daimyo, pass
through the beautiful Kenroku Park, and walk along what was left of
the moat and walls on one side of the Kanazawa castle. And since
these historical sites were always coming up in conversations with
students, I soon became involved in the study of Kaga history.

My interest in Maeda Toshiie and Kaga continued throughout the
remainder of my six years in Kanazawa. My interest was undoubtedly
stimulated too by the fact that I, as a foreigner, could not enter
the castle grounds, even though the castle was right beside the
Fourth Higher School where I taught. I was not permitted to enter
the castle grounds because that was the headquarters of a Japanese
army division. After World War II, the new Kanazawa University was
built on those castle grounds, and the old Fourth Higher School
where I had taught became the university's lower division. So now
anybody can enter that place surrounded by the remains of castle
walls, but not when I worked and lived there.

But my research was focused on Maeda Toshiie, not on the
castle. Before my first three years were over, I had read Japanese
books about him and had translated into English a diary (the
Toshiie Onyawa or Toshiie Tales) said to have been written by him,
but probably had been kept by one of his retainers.

Lage: Was this published and in the bookstores, in the library?

Brown: No. After translating Toshiie 's diary, I got interested (during my
second three-year term) in documents that he had written and
signed. My search led me to the Sonkeikaku Bunko, the archives of
the Maeda clan located in Tokyo near the First Higher School which,
after World War II, became the lower division of Tokyo University.
The archives were and still are located in Tokyo because, after the
Restoration of 1868, strong daimyS like Maeda were moved from their
feudal bases to Tokyo where their descendants have continued to
live in considerable comfort and style. At the Sonkeikaku Bunko,
and with the help of a librarian and good friend by the name of
Imai Kichinosuke, I found fifty-two documents written and signed by

Toshiie. These, as well as the Toshiie Onyawa. I translated into
English.

Lage: My goodness, you were really driven.

Brown: [laughs] Well, I had a lot of help, not only from the local

historian who was responsible for editing the Kaga shiryo (Kaga
Documents) but from my good friend Imai Kichinosuke of the
Sonkeikaku Bunko. When I returned to Japan again after the war, I
saw Mr. Imai several times and he presented me with a copy (one
hundred of these were said to have been made by a company
specializing in reproductions) of a rare medieval emakimono
(picture scroll) on the life of Sugawara no Michizane [845-903].
That three- scroll emakimono . as well as my multivolume set of the
Kaga shiryS. are among the materials that I gave to the East Asian
Library [EAL] at Cal a few years ago. I intend to see that the EAL
also receives other Kaga books and manuscripts.

I did give translations (with commentary) of key documents
written and signed by Toshiie to a Dutch officer of the Asiatic
Society of Japan, hoping that he would accept them for publication
in the society's monograph series called the Transactions of the
Asiatic Society of Japan. But this Dutch officer, whose name I do
not recall, took the manuscript with him to Europe where he got
caught up in the war and was killed. The manuscript too was
apparently destroyed. Since I had not kept a copy of the final
draft, and got interested (after returning to Stanford) in other
questions in medieval Japanese history, I never took the trouble to
prepare and resubmit another such manuscript for publication. So
nothing of what I wrote during those pre-war years is in print.

A Deepening Interest in Japanese Studies

Lage: Were you thinking at the time that this might become a life's work?

Brown: Yes, but I had not yet decided just which path to take. I was not
at all sure that history was the right way to go, but I had
definitely decided to spend the rest of my life learning, and
learning with others as a teacher, about the life and culture of
the Japanese people. A great curiosity had been aroused.
Everything that was happening in my daily life in that distant part
of Japan was so strange--! just had to keep trying to understand
the processes by which their institutions and ideas had been
developed, and were still developing.

•

Lage: Did you find that they also thought you were strange? Or did they
treat you--

Brown: They did. Oh, yes. I was strange, all right.
Lage: Did they ask a lot of questions of you?

Brown: Yes. I suppose the questions they raised caused me to ask

questions. Students were constantly asking me to tell them about
America. "What is this college life like in America? What do
college students do in America?" They didn't know enough about
America to make their questions specific. When they did make the
questions specific, they were often funny. I had one student ask
me if we play baseball in America. Baseball came from America, but
it had been in Japan so long and had become such a big thing, they
did not know or had forgotten that it was introduced from America.

Lage: I didn't realize that, that it had been in Japan that long.
Brown: Yes. Baseball is big there, and has been for a long time.
Lage: Yes, I knew that.

Brown: It is probably bigger, and more people see it, than in this

country. They were also interested in other strange things in the
field of sports; kendo (swordsmanship) was really something. I
went to see them practicing that one day. When I saw this
traditional sport, I soon discovered that winning is not the whole
story. The way you do it is extremely important. I remember going
to see some students practicing with bows and arrows one day. This
is another traditional form of martial arts called kyudo .

Lage: Archery.

Brown: Yes, archery. They were shooting at a target and usually missing
it. The students explained that certain students were doing it
just right, even though they weren't hitting the target. This was
puzzling. The importance they assigned to the way, to the form, to
the style, to the manner in which they did things was what really
mattered. It was the psychological stance that was significant.

Lage: That impressed you at the time?
Brown: I was more puzzled than impressed.

29
First Wife, Mary Nelson Logan Brown

Lage: Did you meet your wife during this time in Japan?

Brown: Mary and I met after I had been in Japan alone for two years. I
met her at a summer resort called Nojiri, which is high in the
mountains of central Japan, a resort where missionary families
often went during the summer. In Japan it is pretty hot in most
places, and so it was great to go to the mountains during the
summer. Kanazawa was one of the hottest places. So I too usually
escaped. I went to Nojiri the second summer. That is where I met
Mary.

She was teaching elementary school children in Birmingham,
Alabama, and had returned to Japan to visit her father, Dr. Charles
A. Logan, who was a missionary in the city of Tokushima on the
southern island of Shikoku. He and the two youngest of his three
daughters (Mary and Martha) were in Nojiri to spend the summer with
him. That was when I met Mary.

Lage: Had she been born and raised in Japan?

Brown: Yes. Her father had gone to Japan as a missionary for the Southern
Presbyterian Church back in about 1904 and was stationed- -from the
first- -at Tokushima. It was there that their two youngest
daughters were born: Mary in 1908, and Martha in 1910. Dr. Harry
Myers, who had married Dr. Logan's sister, had also gone as a
missionary to Kobe—where there was that big earthquake a few
months ago [January 17, 1995]--at about the time of the Russo-
Japanese War in 1904-05.

Tokushima had no English- language school but Kobe had the old
and famous Canadian Academy. So all three Logan daughters went
through high school at the Canadian Academy where they stayed in a
Canadian Academy dormitory but frequently visited their Uncle Harry
and Aunt Grace. Before attending high school in Kobe, the three
girls had had little formal schooling, only when Dr. and Mrs. Logan
spent a one-year furlough in the United States. All three
daughters had lessons for several hours on weekday mornings from
their mother Patty, who used textbooks that had been prepared for
the at-home education of children. Patty was obviously an
excellent teacher as well as a loving wife and mother, for all
three girls, after graduating from the Canadian Academy, entered--
and later graduated from- -Agnes Scott College in the outskirts of
Atlanta, Georgia.

Lage: And what was her full name?

Brown: Mary Nelson Logan Brown.

Lage: She was born and raised there and went to teach in Alabama. That
was probably a cultural shock of its own.

Brown: Yes, but she had experienced three rather drastic changes before

going to Birmingham. The first came in 1910 when she was only two
years old and her parents returned to the United States by way of
Europe on their first sabbatical leave. Mary later remembered only
that she had been a nuisance because of consistently refusing to
drink her milk. The next was in 1919 when Dr. and Mrs. Logan spent
their second sabbatical leave in Decatur, Georgia, where Mary was
enrolled in the fifth grade. Then came the really big change in
1925 when she, at the age of sixteen and accompanied only by her
younger sister Martha, sailed to the United States to enroll at
Agnes Scott College.

But Mary seems never to have suffered cultural shock from any
of these moves. Indeed I have the impression that she thrived on
them, soon developing good friends in each new place and always
getting high grades in her school work.

Although Mary did not return home to Japan a single time
during her four years at college (between the ages of sixteen and
twenty), she continued to have the loving support of family and
relatives. All during those years (and later as well) there was a
weekly exchange of letters between the daughters, and between the
daughters and their parents. Moreover, in Mary's third year at
Agnes Scott, Dr. and Mrs. Logan returned to the United States on
their third sabbatical leave and lived right on the Agnes Scott
campus. That was because Dr. Logan had been invited to teach a
course there and was assigned a house in which the whole family
could live. They all rated 1927-28 a glorious time.

At Agnes Scott, Mary developed good friends, spent some time
with a boyfriend from Canadian Academy, was a member of the hockey
team, majored in math, was tied with another girl for highest
honors, and was elected to membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She once
told me that she liked math because answers were always right or
wrong—not fuzzy as when dealing with questions in history or
philosophy.

So when she moved to Birmingham to teach, she had already
become quite well adjusted to American life. Also there was a year
between graduation and teaching that she spent with her father in
Tokushima, following the sudden death of her mother Patty in 1928.
Mary never told me much about that year with her father but it must
have been rather dull since there were apparently no other young
Americans in towr. In any :asc: she seems to have been delighted to

return to Birmingham where she not only had a lucrative position
paying $100 a month but lived in the home of a good friend--a
classmate from Agnes Scott named Martha Riley Selman--and bought a
new Ford that was used for a trip with friends to Washington, D.C.,
at the time of the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

So when she returned to Japan in the summer of 1934, the
purpose was to visit her father and her sister Martha, who had
returned to Japan to stay with their lonely father. And it was in
the summer of that year that we met and married.

Lage: So she ended up staying there?

Brown: She ended up staying there, because her father suggested that she
give up the job and that we get married right away, not the next
Christmas. [laughter] So we got married at the end of that
summer, in Nojiri, with about thirty-five missionary families
present. Then she went back to Kanazawa with me.

Lage: That changed your life. Now you had someone to talk to all the
time.

Brown: That changed my life, very definitely. Yes, things were quite
different. It was a new start.

Lage: Did she seem to have more of an understanding of the Japanese
people?

Brown: Yes, she knew spoken Japanese quite well, having probably learned

Japanese from maids and neighborhood children about as early as she
learned English. We would go on excursions around Kanazawa and
overhear Japanese talking together in their local dialect. To my
surprise, Mary would giggle to herself and then tell me what they
were saying. And when Japanese salesmen came to the door, it was
she—not me—that figured out what they were trying to sell.

She had not studied the reading and writing of Japanese, but
when she saw that I was working on Japanese readers, she joined me.
It was easy for her and she soon caught up because she already knew
most of the words represented by the characters we were studying.
However, she soon lost interest in such study, for she did not
share my urge to read books about Japanese history. In fact, she
seems to have had no urge to learn more about Japanese culture. At
times I even thought that she was not that happy about living in
Kanazawa, where there were no more than a dozen other Americans.

Lage: She didn't necessarily want to spend her life there.

Brown: Yes. But we did spend a lot of time there. Maybe twenty years
after we got married were spent in Japan. She never complained,
but I often wondered if that was her preference.

Lage: Didn't you ask?

Brown: Yes, but she would say, "Whatever you want." [laughter]

Lage: Those days are gone.

Japanese Students

Lage: What kinds of Japanese people did you get to know? You got to know
your students. What sort of a social background were they from?

Brown: Well, they were all outstanding. Each had been admitted to the
Fourth Higher School because of passing an entrance examination
given to three or four times as many as could be admitted. That
meant that almost every student that I talked to--and many visited
me at my home--said that he had graduated third or fourth from the
top of his middle school class. (Middle schools provided five
years of education beyond the elementary school of six years.)
When I heard that an individual had graduated at that high
position, I usually asked about those who had graduated first,
second, or third in his class. In almost every case the answer
was: "Oh, he entered the military academy." This indicated that
the brightest and most able students had decided to become army or
navy officers.

Those admitted to this particular higher school, and
presumably to one of the other dozen or so, went on—almost without
exception—to one of the five national universities. The brightest
and most ambitious ones usually took an examination for admission
to the top two: Tokyo or Kyoto. I never heard of a graduate of the
Fourth Higher School who was not admitted to a national university.
Those graduating from Tokyo or Kyoto at the top of their class
usually entered the foreign service or some other governmental
office. At least one of my students (Uryu-san) became an
ambassador. Other top university graduates went on for training as
academicians or joined some major corporation. Muto-san, the
student who lived with me for that first year as my interpreter,
became a professor of philosophy at Kyoto University and is famous
for a three-volume study of Kierkegaard. Nakano-san joined a
leading brokerage firm and was head of its New York office for five
years.

I have seen Uryu-san and Muto-san on recent trips to Japan,
and Nakano-san volunteered (after retirement) to teach economic
Japanese to students at the Inter-University Center who were
training themselves for doing business in Japan.

Lage: Well, I wondered about the social class of the people you had
contact with. You have given a good answer here.

Brown: Most of the people I had contact with were students, teachers, and
missionaries who were the foreigners in town. Then there was a
German teacher- -that is another story. All were quite different
and interesting. The main thing about the students was that they
were successful, and they didn't come from any particular social
group. It is true that Muto's father was a successful businessman
in Kobe. I have biographies, incidentally, of many of these
students. When they finished my class, they were supposed to write
an autobiography in English. That was their final examination, as
it were.

Lage: Was that your assignment, or the school's assignment?

Brown: That was my assignment. And I have copies of them. I did find out
about the family background of most of my students. My impression
is that most of them were from ordinary, middle-class families.
And maybe even lower than that .

Lage: But there was an ability to move up?

Brown: The big thing was: they were bright enough, energetic enough, and

ambitious enough to get ahead in school. If they did that and were
successful, they would come to this school.

I remember one day going out behind my house in the garden,
shortly after we were married. Here was a woman coming in to pick
up the garbage. She was the garbage collector. Being gung-ho in
those days about learning Japanese, I started a conversation with
her. She said, after a bit of talk about the weather, that her son
was in the school where I was teaching.

She was obviously of a very humble family, and she was working
to get enough money together to enable her son to go to this
school. I don't know that I took the trouble of finding out--I
don't think that student was in my class. But he undoubtedly
became a very prosperous professional, probably an engineer or
teacher, but from a very lowly background. So I don't know that
the students came from a particular class.

Lage: That is interesting. Something I wouldn't expect.

Brown: Yes, it was a shocker.

I have another story. It is a little later, but it shows the
same thing. At a nearby train station, an old man had a little
shack for the articles he needed for shining shoes. I used to go
regularly to him to get my shoes shined.

Once I went on a busy day, so his wife was helping him. She
was almost blind, so blind that she couldn't see me. She didn't
know I was a foreigner. When she was shining my shoes she was
within six inches of my shoes, trying to see what she was doing. I
got to talking to her. I don't know what we were talking about.
Finally she looked up at me and she said, "Are you a foreigner?" I
said, "Yes." Then she started asking me questions. Why am I in
Japan? Where I came from? One thing and another. She finally
said, "I have a nephew who is at Harvard." At Harvard!

I guess what all this says to me is that it is not class or
social level that matters, it is education. If you can make it in
education, that makes the difference. Education is important.
That seems to explain why all Asian students, even to the second
and third generation, are good students. They like to learn. It's
somehow drilled into them. I think it comes from the Confucian
background that is common to that whole area. Confucius himself
was interested in learning. There developed in China a so-called
literati class, a class of learning. That emphasis upon education
and learning is a fascinating feature of Japanese, Chinese, and
Southeast Asian culture.

Lage: Yes, it does seem to be.

An American in Japan

Lage: What encounters did you have with Japanese militarism or animosity
towards Americans? You were there while relations were really
getting bad with America.

Brown: Oh, yes. I was mostly considered a potential or real spy.
Lage: Really? By whom?

Brown: By the police and the military. Near the entrance to the castle
was the police station.

Lage: And you had this great interest in the castle.

Brown: Yes. The police station was there, too. [laughing] One of the

policemen was assigned to me. I think he really had responsibility
for all foreigners. He didn't know any English, but it was his job
to keep track of us , what we were doing and even what we were
thinking.

Lage: With no English, that must have been hard.

Brown: He spoke to us in Japanese. This man would come to me--maybe once
a month or more often. I would invite him in, give him tea, and we
would talk. I could see that he had to write a report when he got
back. He would ask where I had been, where I was going, what I was
doing, and above all, whether I had any interest in Marxist books.

Lage: In Marxist books?

Brown: Yes. They were afraid of communism, you see. As a matter of fact,
I went into a classroom one day and about a third of the class was
missing. I was told that one of the students had been found in
possession of some books on Marx. He and his friends were all
picked up for questioning by the police. This policeman that came
to me would always get around to the subject of Marx.

Lage: Were you ever tempted to tease about it, or was this pretty
serious?

Brown: I knew it was coming. The position I usually took was, "Well, I

don't know much about it. Tell me." I would ask him, "Who is this
man by the name of Marx, anyway?" [laughter] And so on. If he
would ask about it, I would say, "Do you think there is something I
ought to read in this area?" I had fun with him.

One day I was walking down to school by the police office. I
saw him on the other side of the street and went across to see him.
I said, "I haven't seen you for a while." He said, "It's been kind
of busy." I said, "You don't know I am going to Kyoto next
weekend." He practically dropped in the ditch by the road.

Lage: Was that not-
Brown: He was supposed to know that. Here I was telling him something
that he was supposed to find out, you see. He had to know right
away, for his report, why I was going to Kyoto, and so on. He was
especially worried about me when a friend of mine from Kobe- -I
think he was consul general in Kobe at that time- -came to visit us
in Kanazawa. The consul general may have been interested in
visiting me because he wanted to find out what was going on in that
division headquarters, I don't know. But because he did visit me,

this policeman really became quite inquisitive about him, about
what he did while he was in Kanazawa, et cetera.

Then I went on a trip—this is even before I got married--to
Korea and Manchuria one spring vacation. I took count. I think I
was questioned seventeen times by policemen before I got to Seoul
in Korea. I really was a problem for them because I didn't know
where I was going or how long I was going to stay. I had no plans.
I was playing it by ear.

Lage: Did you have to tell them before you went?

Brown: We were supposed to, but I just hadn't worked things out yet. I

would often be awakened in the middle of the night on a train by a
policeman who had just come on duty at a particular station to find
out where I was going. It was really a nuisance. They were quite
worried about espionage.

Lage: Did it disturb you that you had all this questioning?

Brown: No, it didn't. It sort of amused me, I don't know why. I suppose

I should have been bothered, but I wasn't. That's what they were

supposed to do. In class, of course, the students were always
asking me about America's policy toward Japan.

Lage: Shortly after you got there was the Manchurian Incident [1931], the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Brown: The Manchurian Incident, yes. That was when the Japanese military
began to take over--it was a long process. That was just the first
stage of it. Invariably, I would go into class and find some such
question on the blackboard as, "Please explain why America is so
unreasonable about Japan's position in Manchuria."

Lage: They would question you?

Brown: They would want me to explain, would want me to justify the

American position. The United States was being quite critical of
Japan. It was because of the American position on Japan's role in
Manchuria that the Japanese eventually pulled out of the League of
Nations. The international situation was always coming up.

Lage: Were you well enough informed to answer them?

Brown: I read the newspapers. I would try. My own position gradually
shifted in the face of all this questioning. In the beginning,
coming out of America and the university at the time of the

Depression, I had a lot of questions of my own about the way our
government was operating and about our foreign policy. Nationalism
was not a big thing with us at that time.

But in the face of these questions that I got from students
and teachers over and over, day after day, I gradually became
nationalistic, more defensive of the United States and what we were
doing. I found myself not simply explaining, but justifying, in a
way that I maybe shouldn't have. But that was the way I felt.

Lage: It is sort of a psychological phenomenon. I have heard other
people talk about it.

Brown: I know this happened to my teacher at Stanford, Professor Yamato
Ichihashi. In the United States he went through the same kind of
change in the face of questions about Japan. He became more and
more nationalistic and more defensive.

Lage: Did you find any of your students or the other teachers who
questioned their own government's policy?

Brown: Very few. This also puzzled me. They all seemed to have exactly
the same position. All seemed to believe in the official Japanese
position about the foreign situation. More precisely, they all
felt that what Japan was doing in Asia was good for the Asians.
They had a kind of sacred mission that they kept talking about. It
was harped on, over and over.

Lage: They didn't think of themselves as oppressors?

Brown: They seemed to believe what they were saying. That too was
puzzling.

I remember a discussion in one class about American opposition
to Japanese activities in China. One student said, "Can't the
Americans, can't you, understand that the military is not there
because we want more territory? They are there to help the Asians,
to help the Chinese." My answer was, "I hear what you are saying.
But from the American point of view, there is only one key fact
that they see and know: Japanese troops are not in Japan, but in
China." [laughter] That didn't satisfy them. They were in China
for a good cause, a righteous cause.

Lage: It shows how we are shaped by our own points of view.
What about impressions you got of militarism?

Brown: I said that a division was stationed in the castle. On the way to
the school I passed through what was known as the "Parade Ground."

Lage:

Brown:

It was a place for military exercises. That's where we also had
our biggest ceremonies. The brother of the emperor came once, and
we had the whole place filled with people. When I walked through
there on the way to school, usually the military was out there
training, with guns. I would hear guns being fired all around me.
I had the uneasy feeling that a lot of those guns were aimed at me.
They had blanks in the guns, I think. Still, I didn't feel any
special antipathy. I did have a few rocks thrown at me at some
distance. I wasn't hit. Although they got very angry at the
United States at various times while I was there, and the students
would ask me to explain American positions as if I had some
responsibility for those positions, there was not much antipathy.

Did they ever ask you about American immigration policies or
American treatment of Japanese?

Oh, yes, they would ask about that. But that wasn't such a great
issue as the American position on Japanese activities in Asia.
That's really what they were mostly interested in.

Neighbor and Fellow Teacher, the Nazi

Brown: My interest in international relations was further aroused by my
neighbor, the German, who was a Nazi.

Lage: He was a fellow teacher?

Brown: Yes, he taught German and I taught English. He had a house just

like mine. There were two houses. One for the German teacher, one
for the English teacher. This German couple was about the same age
as we were. We saw each other often. We ate dinner with them
frequently and played a German version of bridge called Skat. We
learned how to play it and spent a good deal of time with that.

But we also talked about politics.
Lage: In Japanese?

Brown: No, in English. He was very good in English, although there was a
definite accent. He was very bright and interesting, but a Nazi.
He had gotten a Ph.D. in philosophy and was a sculptor. He came to
Japan with an interest in a famous sculptor who lived in Kanazawa.
He came after I did, and I remember that soon after his arrival, he
got one of the Japanese German teachers to run down a book that had
been written about this sculptor, a book that he had heard about
before coming to Japan. He got hold of that book and hired a tutor

who started teaching him how to read it. His study of Japanese was
limited to the study of that book about a former Japanese sculptor.
It took him weeks to get through the first page. He wouldn't study
anything else, just that book.

I must say, he learned Japanese very rapidly. I became
convinced that it was a good approach, which I have frequently
recommended to students. I am convinced that I learned Japanese as
rapidly as I did because I was working on historical materials in
which I had a special interest. I think I learned more Japanese
than I would have if I had just been studying textbooks.

This German, who was a Nazi, soon revealed that he was a Nazi.
I saw him at a summer resort called Karuizawa, for example, where
he was associating with other Nazis. He was "Heil Hitlering"
everybody as he went down the streets of Karuizawa. He made no
bones about being a supporter of Hitler. He justified everything
that Hitler was doing and doubted whether democracy made any sense
whatsoever. He was constantly raising questions about ideals which
I had assumed were important --

Lage: And universal, almost universal.

Brown: Yes. It was really troubling to talk to him. We really got angry
at each other, over and over. But since we lived next door, we
still continued to see each other. I must say, he made me rethink
and rethink my own position about what was important and valuable.
Getting his position and the Japanese position, both of which were
entirely different from my own, was really--

Lage: Did it solidify you in your own tradition, make you--

Brown: Oh, yes. It forced me to think things through and to understand

why our ideals are important and what they really meant . I somehow
had to work out in my own mind just who a liberal was and what he
believed. I could do that, I think, because it was so different
from what he was saying about liberalism: that it was nothing but a
form of weakness. Power and strength was what he talked about.

Lage: Fascinating. Do you think that stood you in good stead, this

process you had of thinking things through? Would it have affected
you?

Brown: It stimulated me, yes. I had to get ready for my next conversation
with him. My next defense was coming up.

Lage: What about the next part of your life? Did this carry through to
confronting some crisis or--

Brown: To the extent that it stimulated my thinking about cultural values,
my own values, and the values of the Japanese and the Germans, a
kind of comparative slant appeared.

Lage: Or maybe affected your scholarship?

Brown: I think so. It didn't make me more excited about or receptive to

his ideas, but I still had to try to understand them and understand
how they got that way, and why.

Lage: Sounds like an historian to me.

Brown: Yes, right. In a way, the Germans and the Japanese were moving

down the same authoritarian track. I was, in a sense, responding
to both. It was really stimulating.

"Emperorism"--The Religion of Japan

Brown: I became interested quite early in the emperor's position and what
it had to do with the strange behavior and value system of the
Japanese people.

This strangeness struck me quite sharply one day when I was
going to the back of the school where the basketball court was
located. On the way I saw that every student passing a certain
place stopped and bowed before going on. After seeing this two or
three times, I asked somebody why. The answer was: "They are
bowing to a picture of the emperor." And when I expressed surprise
and asked if I could see the picture, the answer was, "Oh, no! It
is locked up in a vault . "

Later on I also discovered that the teachers took turns
guarding the vault, but this foreign teacher was not requested to
take a turn- -he was not my emperor!

At every national holiday ceremony that I attended during my
six years of teaching at that school, this sacred picture of the
emperor was taken from its vault (presumably in a ceremonial way
that I had no opportunity to observe) and placed in an alcove at
the back of the stage in the school's ceremonial hall. For this
special occasion every teacher, including this foreign one, was
expected to be dressed in a morning suit, and every student was
expected to have his uniform clean- -even the towel that was
traditionally hung from his right hip pocket was unusually clean!
Clearly the central object of reverence was the picture.

As soon as the principal of the school walked in carrying a
box in which we knew was a copy of the Imperial Edict on Education
(handed down by Emperor Meiji in the year 1890), the curtains in
front of the emperor's picture were pulled open. And as soon as
that happened, everybody was expected to bow, and to remain bowing
as long as the curtains before the emperor's picture were open.

Lage: It is hard to look at the picture while you are bowing.

Brown: You have to peek! [laughter] By peeking I saw that it was a

picture of the emperor, and not a very big one. It was however
obviously treated as something quite sacred. So while the
principal ceremoniously unrolled the Imperial Rescript, and began
to read it in a ritualistic way, we had to keep bowing.

Whenever our principal read the Rescript on one of the
national holidays, he was careful to read it right. I was told
that there had been several occasions, at other times and places,
when the Rescript was read improperly and when negligent and
disrespectful principals were forced to commit suicide.

When our principal would finish his reading of the Rescript,
which was on a scroll, he would slowly and respectfully rewind it
and then put it back into its special box. After he walked- -slowly
and with great dignity- -from the platform, the curtain before the
emperor's picture would be closed, and everybody could leave, but
only in a proper and orderly fashion.

The sacred position of the emperor in the hearts and minds of
the Japanese people was revealed at other times and places. Once
at the station where I was taking a train for a neighboring town, I
spotted a virtually empty car on the train that I was taking. When
I started to enter, I was firmly told that no one was permitted to
enter that car. I soon saw why. In the very middle of the car sat
four men dressed in morning suits, sitting up stiffly and holding a
box on their laps. Someone explained that these men were
delivering a picture of the emperor to some school. Presumably
when they arrived, the picture would be placed in a vault and be
brought out only for important ceremonies when the Imperial
Rescript on Education would be reread to all assembled teachers and
students .

A missionary teacher, a Japanese man that I was talking to
just before I came home in 1938, said that the religion of Japan is
not Shinto or Buddhism, or Christianity, but Emperorism. In a
sense, he was right.

For more than a thousand years the emperor has been revered as
a direct descendant of the Great Sun Goddess. Whenever a new

emperor is placed on the throne, a Great Enthronement Ceremony
(dai1o-sai) is held. The one for Emperor Akihito lasted more than
a year. At the heait of this most sacred rite, it is said and
believed that a part of the Great Sun Goddess enters the body of
the new emperor, making him the highest and most sacred priest of
Japan, a kind of pope.

Since the end of World War II, he has of course been treated
quite differently. Soon after the war, Emperor Hirohito even
publicly stated that he was not divine. But in the pre-war years
when I was teaching in Japan, he was so divine that few people-
especially foreigners like me- -ever saw him. I remember reading
that when he was going to some special affair in the city of
Nagano, a terrible mistake was made. Everything possible had been
done to clean up the streets along which the emperor was scheduled
to pass — even steps had been taken to see that no one was on the
second floor of any building where he or she might look down on the
emperor. But someone at the head of the procession turned right
when he should have gone straight ahead. This meant that the
emperor proceeded down a street that had not been properly prepared
and cleaned. I forget how many people committed suicide over that.
But, as I recall, even the minister of the Interior had to resign.
This was another indication of the emperor's importance and
divinity.

Lage: Is this the subject of the book you are working on at this point?

Brown: I am working now on a book on the Great Goddess. I want to see how
this religious development is related to the whole of Japanese
culture. I want to look at the problem holistically.

Lage: Interesting. I think we should wind up, because we've spent a long
time.

Militarism in Japan
[Interview 2: March 20, 1995]

Lage: We talked quite a bit last session about your time in the thirties
in Japan. We were just getting to your observations of the growing
militarism. You were going to tell me about an incident with the
Young Officers' Movement that you observed.

Brown: That's right. I said something about my experience seeing soldiers
in Kanazawa where I lived all during that period. I was very much
aware of the presence and power of the military. Did I say

anything about my relations with military officers in the school in
which I taught?

Lage: No, I don't believe so.

Brown: This school where I taught, the Fourth Higher School, was somewhat
like a junior college. It was a preparatory school for the
universities. There were only about fifteen of these schools
around the country. No student got into the university without
going through one of these higher schools. Therefore getting into
it was difficult. As I think I said earlier, only students
graduating at the top of their middle school classes could expect
admission. And all graduates, almost without exception, were
admitted to one of the national universities and eventually rose to
high positions in business or government.

But army officers were assigned to all these dozen or so
prominent preparatory schools. Their function was to take care of
the students' required military training. Some of this took the
form of several days of training in the outskirts of town, which
came several times during the year and was never cancelled because
of inclement weather. Students seemed to dislike such training,
especially when it came in the dead of winter or at a time of heavy
rain.

One day I went into one of my classes and discovered that
about half of the students were absent. When I started asking
about this, I discovered that they had had an all-weekend military
training session in the rain. One morning when they were supposed
to get up for training at dawn, some of the students just wouldn't
move. They stayed in bed. The officers lowered the boom on them.
They were expelled from school temporarily, because of this
disobedience. So this military side of the education was quite
apparent and very interesting.

Lage: It doesn't sound like the students were too enthused about it.

Brown: No, they weren't. They weren't exactly opposed to military
training, they just didn't like this long, tedious training,
especially if it was raining or cold.

Lage: Creature comforts, rather than philosophy. [laughter]
Brown: That's right.

The Party and the Geisha Girl

Brown: I had one personal contact with a high-ranking army officer

assigned to our school. The occasion was a faculty dinner party.
Since our school was only for male students, and the teachers were
all men, no woman was present as a guest, although there were women
waiters and geisha girls. But this top military officer,
considered to be a member of the faculty, was present.

I have referred to this as a dinner party but it was not like
a dinner party in this country. Not only were there no wives or
female teachers present, we sat on the tatami floor of a large
Japanese-style room. Each of us sat on cushions arranged around
the room, and before each of us was a small table to which
waitresses brought (on their knees) one special dish after another.
Geisha girls were also present. I don't need to explain about
geisha, do I?

Lage: I don't think so, except in the context of this story.

Brown: Several aspects of that party were interesting. One was my going
to the affair with my German Nazi neighbor, a self-assured man who
was well over six feet tall. After taking off our shoes he
preceded me (naturally) through the entrance way to the main
banquet room. We both knew, as we entered, that we were expected
to bow and greet those who had arrived before us. He decided to do
it in the Japanese way, kneeling down on the mat and greeting our
colleagues in Japanese. As he did this, I looked at the faces of
our fellow teachers and got the distinct impression that this
German was performing a ludicrous stunt--that this was an odd-
looking foreigner trying to act like a Japanese and making a fool
of himself.

Lage: It wasn't expected of a foreigner?

Brown: No. So 1 decided not to do it that way, to do it in the American

way. I stood up and just bowed and said "Good evening" in English.

Lage: In English?

Brown: I even did it in English. In other words, I jumped to the

conclusion that I was supposed to act like a foreigner, and because
I wouldn't be able to do it quite right in the Japanese way.

I think this had something to do with the way I behaved toward
the Japanese thereafter. I did not try to be a Japanese, although
I worked hard at using the Japanese language. On ceremonial
situations, where it didn't really matter that mu :h what you said,

I felt that speaking in English was what was expected, and even
appreciated.

The other experience that I had was with this army officer.
Maybe I should talk about the geisha girl first.

Lage: I would like to hear a little about the geisha girl. [laughter]
Brown: Are you listening, Margaret? [Calls to Mrs. Brown]

Lage: She's on the phone. I can hear her voice. Were you married at the
time?

Brown: I was married, just recently married, but the wives were not
invited .

Lage: Which was standard?

Brown: Which was standard. Mary had been in Japan long enough to realize
that she would not be invited and was therefore neither surprised
nor hurt.

Five or six geisha girls were present. They were not waiting
on tables—waitresses were doing that—but entertaining the guests
by serving them sake, conversing and joking with them, and (later
on in the evening) singing, dancing, and playing the samisen. a
three-stringed musical instrument introduced from China around the
sixteenth century.

During the dinner one particular geisha came to my table to
pour sake and to talk. Like each of the colleagues who had come to
share cups of sake with me, she politely kneeled in front of my
table, took my small sake cup (with both hands), daintily dipped it
into a bowl of water that was nearby to get it clean, and handed it
to me to hold while she poured some sake into it from a nearby sake
bottle. (The maids saw to it that empty bottles were immediately
replaced.) Then after I had taken a sip or two, I would dip the
cup into the water and hand it (with both hands) to her and while
she held it (with both hands), I would pour a drink for her. As
this was going on, she was raising stock questions as to why I had
come to Japan and whether I really liked their foul weather. Then
she asked me where and how we ate . I told her that we had a
Japanese maid who knew how to cook both Japanese and Western meals.
Then she said, "How do you talk to her?" My reply was: "We talk to
her the way I am talking to you." She seemed a bit startled by
that and blurted out, "Oh, we are talking in Japanese, aren't we?"

Lage: How funny! Was she flirtatious in talking to you?

Brown: No, I wouldn't say so. This is hard to understand but it was

generally assumed that no foreigner could possibly speak Japanese.
They were so convinced of this that even when we said anything, it
was assumed that we were speaking in some foreign language, not
Japanese. This geisha girl too seemed to think that since I was a
foreigner and was talking, I must be talking in some non- Japanese
language .

Lage: That is a very funny mindset.

Brown: Yes. It is a mindset that I ran across on other occasions. So I
wasn't that much surprised by her reaction. She did, at least,
laugh when she realized that we were speaking in Japanese.

Anyway, most of the four-hour dinner party was taken up with
eating (we probably had fifteen or twenty different small dishes of
various delicacies, topped off with as much rice as one wanted) and
exchanging drinks and talking. One would normally be visited by,
and visit, each of the guests present, as well as drink and talk
with one or more geisha. So I must have talked with that
particular geisha two or three times.

Lage: Lots of drinking, it sounds like.

Brown: Oh, yes. Lots of drinking. I was exchanging drinks with this army
officer when he said to me, "Why don't you go to the geisha house
with us after the party?" He had seen me talking to this girl.
But I said, "I am married, and I don't think my wife would like me
to do that." I think it was he- -maybe it was the principal of the
school that I was also exchanging drinks with- -who said, in urging
me to go to the geisha house after the dinner party, "The way to
handle the wife is to stay out all night. She will be so glad to
see you when you do come home in the morning that she will forget
everything." [laughter]

There was one follow-up to that party. I was going to school
one morning on a streetcar when I saw the same geisha girl. I was
a bit worried because I knew very well that any sort of
relationship with a geisha would get out. It was a very serious
matter, probably leading to deportation. That's what I had been
told.

Lage: But if you had gone to the geisha house that night, would that have
not gotten out?

Brown: That would have been in the privacy of the geisha house. But this
was in a public streetcar. She was standing just a few feet away
and students were all around. I was convinced that she had noticed
me—most everyone noticed foreigners because we were so few in

number and so dif ferent--but she acted as if she had no idea who I
was. (Later I was told that geisha are trained not to recognize
customers in public places.) Anyway, I was relieved that she did
not recognize me. That was the last time I ever saw her.

The Young Officers' Movement. 1936

Brown: Getting back to the military connection, in 1936 there was a famous
incident in Tokyo called the February 26th Incident, in which young
army officers almost seized control of the government. There
weren't too many of them, maybe a hundred or two. They used their
weapons to methodically assassinate five or six key government
leaders. Then they established their headquarters in the Sanno
Hotel, which still exists. For several hours, while they were in
control even of radio stations, it was thought that they might have
taken control of the entire Japanese government.

As it turned out, the army soon regained control. Rebel
leaders were arrested and tried. Several were condemned to death.

This is thought to have been a turning point in modern
Japanese history. After that, the army and navy exerted far
greater power in political and international affairs. The uprising
was led by young military officers taking military action against
their superior officers who, they said, were too cozy with Japan's
greedy politicians and bureaucrats.

Lage: Were they of a more militaristic bent than the--?
Brown: The young officers, you mean?
Lage: Right.

Brown: They were junior army officers who felt that the government of

Japan was really being run by corporation heads who really did not
care about the welfare of the people, who were more interested in
making money than serving the country. So these rebels set out to
assassinate the principal leaders and to see that "righteous"
military men were placed in positions of control. Their enemies
were not only powerful industrialists and politicians but top
military officers who were not paying enough attention to a
"righteous form of imperial rule." What they wanted was to
establish a government that would be run by the emperor (another
restoration) with the advice of "righteous" generals and admirals
that were named.

A student by the name of Royal Wald wrote his dissertation
under me on the "Young Officer Movement" of those years. His
research showed that most of these young officers were from rural
areas that had been hit hard by the economic depression. Although
Japan's depression does not seem to have been as serious as it was
in the United States, there was a sharp drop in the price of silk
after 1929 that caused a collapse in the Japanese export of silk
and that made life quite miserable for farmers in areas where
people were making a living from the sale of raw silk. And it was
from such areas that most of the discontented young military
officers came. Miserable conditions at home seems to have been
connected with their objections to the way government was being
run.

In a sense the rebels, although defeated and ruthlessly
punished, succeeded. While they did not succeed in getting their
"righteous" officers placed in positions of control, their
rebellion was followed by the appointment of prime ministers and
cabinet officers who placed more and more control in the hands of
military leaders. That gave the military greater control over
affairs of state. I think most scholars of the period would agree
that after 1936 the military—the army and the navy—really
controlled Japan.

Lage: Was that something you would have noticed as somebody living there
at the time? Or does this come in retrospect from your studies?

Brown: Oh, no. We could see it. It was in the newspapers every day.
Lage: So you were following that kind of--

Brown: Oh, yes. I was reading the newspapers and listening to the radio
every day, like everybody else. The students, teachers, and most
everyone that I met and talked with were concerned. One of my
colleagues at the Fourth Higher School said that he was humiliated
by the development, saying that Japan was now like the Balkans.

Shortly after the February Incident, all schools were closed
for the spring vacation. And that was when Mary and I went to
visit Mary's missionary cousins (Dr. and Mrs. Smythe of the Kinjo
Gakuin college for girls) in Nagoya, which is one of Japan's three
largest cities. We stayed in their beautiful home and had a most
pleasant Easter vacation. During our stay I met a young army
officer who had come to visit Dr. Smythe, apparently because he had
been attending Dr. Smythe 's Bible class. This young man turned out
to belong to the same regiment to which most of the young rebels
belonged. Consequently he knew many of the persons whose names had
been appearing in the newspapers and radio broadcasts. And it soon
became clear that he felt the same way and would have joined them

in the rebellion if he had been on duty at the time. Instead he
was in Nagoya recuperating from illness. Since he had said enough
to Dr. Smythe to indicate his connections and leanings, and Dr.
Smythe passed the word along to me, I became interested in meeting
and talking to him. So we were introduced. We spent hours
together because he was interested in talking about the affair, and
I was interested in listening. My Japanese was better than his
English, and so the sessions were entirely in Japanese.

Lage: Too bad you didn't have a tape recorder.

Brown: It is too bad I didn't have a tape recorder, like this one. I did
write a long letter for Professor Treat later on, but I have no
copy. Recently a man at Stanford was going through the papers of
Professor Treat and found several letters that I had written to
Professor Treat, but not that one. It was one that I wanted
especially to see because I had spent a long time writing it, and I
kept no copy. If I could have looked over that letter before this
interview, I would be much wordier in responding to your question.
I do recall, however, a distinct sense of discontent and anger that
he shared with fellow officers who had decided to rebel against
their greedy and selfish leaders.

Lage: Was he also from an area that had been hit economically?

Brown: Apparently. I don't remember asking what part of the country he

came from, but his home must have been near Nagoya because that is
where he had come to recuperate. He said or implied that he too
would have been out there shooting at those greedy officials if he
had been well. Instead, he was ill and at home.

Lage: It is interesting that he felt free to talk to you.

Brown: That is also interesting. I have gotten the impression on other

occasions that the Japanese are willing to say things to foreigners
that they might not say to a Japanese. I don't know just why this
is. Of course the young officer had already talked to Dr. Smythe
in Japanese and probably was not surprised to meet his Japanese-
speaking foreigner. I do not know why but many Japanese seem to
talk more freely to foreigners than with each other.

Lage: Maybe they knew you didn't have corridors into power, to report on
them, or--

Brown: That might be. I certainly didn't know anyone to report to.

Lage: Of course, you did have your officer that you had to report to, the
officer that interviewed you periodically about your activities.

Brown: Oh, yes. I didn't tell him about that conversation. You mean the
police officer in Kanazawa?

Lage: Right.

Brown: That is interesting. I don't think he asked me about my stay in

Nagoya. If he did, I would have told him when and where I went but
would certainly not have told him that I had been talking to a
young radical. That might have caused him and me a lot of trouble.

Lage: Right. That's very interesting. You were really seeing all this
history in the making.

Brown: That's right. Getting to talk to a young military officer involved
in the February Incident of 1936. One does not often have that
kind of experience.

Decision to Leave Japan

Lage: We could probably spend our whole interview talking about this time
period, because it is so interesting. But I think we should try to
move on, why you left Japan and how you happened to go back for
graduate studies.

Brown: About leaving Japan, I had a problem. I had an opportunity to stay
in Japan another three years, having received an offer of a
position to teach English at the Peers School in Tokyo, a special
school for members of the royal family. I was tempted to take the
position because that would enable me to achieve greater mastery of
the language, and to learn more Japanese history, especially if I
were to study under Japanese historians at the Tokyo University,
the country's most prestigious university.

I was undoubtedly influenced by the knowledge that Professor
Serge Elisseeff of Harvard had studied at Tokyo University before
beginning his teaching career in Paris, and later accepting an
appointment at Harvard. And it so happened that Professor
Elisseeff was in Tokyo during that spring of 1938, just when I was
trying to decide whether to stay on in Japan for another three
years. We too were in Tokyo at the time, having arrived there to
spend the spring vacation with Mary's father, Dr. Charles A. Logan
and his new wife Laura. So I went to see Dr. Elisseeff and to seek
his advice on what I should do. Knowing that he had spent several
years at Tokyo University, I fully expected him to recommend that I
take the route he had taken. But to my amazement, this was not
recommended. Instead he said, quite emphatically, that if my aim

was to become a professor in Japanese history at an American
university, I should spend no more time in Japan but return to the
United States and become a candidate for the Ph.D. degree at an
American university. It was more important, he pointed out, to
obtain an American Ph.D. than to spend more time gaining a better
knowledge of Japan's language and history.

Lage: It was more a career-
Brown: Yes. He was thinking about my future as a teacher, because I had
to think about getting a job and making a living. And other
people, too, made recommendations along that line. So I decided
not to take the job.

Lage: That would have put you there right in 1941, wouldn't it?

Brown: That's right. That would have been a really troublesome period.
Already the war with China had started. That began back in '37,
and I left in '38. The situation didn't look good. Maybe that
influenced me.

Lage: How about your wife? Did she want to get out of Japan?

Brown: I think, as I said earlier, she probably preferred to live in the
United States. That may have been another factor. Although she
always said that whatever I wanted to do would be what she wanted
to do. [laughter]

So I applied for admission to Stanford for work toward a Ph.D.
in Japanese history. At that time I also applied for a
scholarship, because I was married and we had to think about making
a living after we got back. I applied to the Rockefeller
Foundation and they offered me a scholarship with the condition
that I go either to Harvard, Colombia, or Berkeley.

Herbert Norman and Howard Norman

Brown: After talking to various people, including Howard Norman and his
brother Herbert Norman--

Lage: Who were they?

Brown: Howard and Herbert Norman were born in Japan as sons of a

distinguished Canadian missionary. We first be :ame acquainted with

Howard and his wife Gwen because he, the older of the two sons, had
become a missionary and was living near us in Kanazawa. Their
home, located beside the parade grounds mentioned above, was where
Dr. Harper Coates (Howard's predecessor in Kanazwa) had also lived.

Before going on about Howard and his brother Herbert, I feel
impelled to say something about Dr. Harper Coates because he was,
in addition to being a conscientious and diligent missionary, a
distinguished Buddhist scholar who had much to do with my interest
in, and study of, Japanese history. He had become immersed in the
study of Japan's Buddhist Reformation of the thirteenth century and
in comparing it with the Christian Reformation, which came
approximately three centuries later.

Lage: Interested in studying it, or interested in becoming one?

Brown: He was interested in studying Buddhism, not in becoming a Buddhist.
Indeed I think it is fair to say that he became engaged in a
serious study of Honen, a leading figure of Japan's Buddhist
Reformation, because he thought such study would make him a better
missionary. That surely was what drove other missionaries, such as
Dr. Daniel Holtom and Dr. Karl Reischaurer, to immerse themselves
in the study of Japanese religion and history, and to turn out
distinguished books and articles. Dr. Coates had been in Japan
several years by the time of my arrival in 1932, and had worked
with a Japanese scholar in producing a two-volume study of Honen.
[Honen, The Buddhist Saint; His Life and Teachings (1930)] It is
still a valued reference for graduate students engaged in research
at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, an institute
supported by a popular Buddhist sect rooted in the teachings and
writings of Honen. Dr. Coates1 impressive command of Japanese, and
his enthusiasm for gaining an in-depth knowledge of a Buddhist
leader who is often compared to Luther, certainly rubbed off on me,
and made me quite willing to spending several hours a day on the
study of Japan's language and history.

Lege: Do they call it protestant Buddhism?

Brown: No, they refer to it as their Buddhist Reformation, not using a
Japanese equivalent of "protestant". The history of Japan's
Buddhist Reformation is however often compared to the history of
the West's Protestant Reformation, although the former came three
centuries earlier. Several Buddhist sects emerged in Japan during
the thirteenth century, just as several Protestant denominations
were founded in Europe and America during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. So it was logical that Dr. Coates should
have become interested in a Buddhist teacher whose writings are as
important to modern Buddhism as the writings of Luther and Calvin
ar ! to modern Christianity.

Lage: Somehow--! don't even know what question to ask you- -but it

intrigues me that the Christian missionaries who were going to
Japan to convert Japanese to Christianity would develop this
extreme interest in the native religion.

Brown: I think that they were doing it in order to convert the Japanese.
Lage: So it wasn't just an abstract interest, but he had a reason for it.

Brown: Yes, they were really interested in the Japanese and felt that they
had to know something about their religious beliefs and practices
if conversions were to be made. Their position was not unlike that
of a businessman who feels that he must know the tastes of his
potential customers in order to make sales pitches, or write ads,
that will sell goods. Many missionaries—not all to be sure—were
quite sure they would be successful only if they studied the
Japanese language and religion.

Dr. Coates was certainly open-minded and tolerant. I remember
an incident in which these qualities were manifested. A
distinguished American scholar of Shinto came to Kanazawa while I
was there. I did not meet him and do not remember his name, but
priests of a local Buddhist temple invited him to make a public
presentation of his views and findings. But this foreign scholar
knew no Japanese and the priests at the temple knew no English. So
Dr. Coates was invited to serve as interpreter, and he readily
accepted. So here in this distant part of Japan, at a time when
the nationalism of Japan was being referred to as
"ultranationalism", we have a Christian Baptist missionary (Dr.
Coates) interpreting for an American scholar speaking on Shinto at
a Buddhist temple.

Lage: That is wonderful. [laughing]

So you decided that Harvard wasn't the place?

Brown: Well, it was Dr. Elisseeff that convinced me I should not do

graduate work at Tokyo University, and Herbert Norman who convinced
me I should not go to Harvard, even though I had received a
scholarship that was contingent upon going there for graduate work,
or to Columbia or Berkeley. And I felt I had to show how my
contact with Herbert was preceded by a rather special relationship
with his brother Howard, whose predecessor in Kanazawa was Dr.
Coates.

Howard, like Dr. Coates, had a deep and special interest in
the life and culture of the Japanese people. But unlike Dr. Coates
who had to start his study of the Japanese language after arriving
in Japan as a missionary, Howard had been born in Japan and had

used Japanese since childhood. But like Dr. Coates, he seems to
have felt compelled, as a missionary, to gain an in-depth knowledge
of the Japanese people. His study was however not centered on
religion but on literature. He read widely in modern Japanese
literature and translated the works of famous authors into English.

Now I come to Herbert Norman who had told me about his
experience at Harvard, and who was later to become famous for his
book The Emergence of Modern Japan, and as a Canadian diplomat. I
first met Herbert during the summer of 1936, I think it was, when
he was a graduate student at Columbia and was back in Japan for
some special study. Herbert was not a missionary like his father
and brother, but was deeply interested in the history and culture
of the Japanese people and decided to become a candidate for the
Ph.D. degree in history. He started his graduate training at
Harvard but moved to Columbia because, he said, the professors at
Harvard (such as Dr. Elisseeff) were specialists in literature or
philology, not in history. During a long walk I had with him and
his Japanese friend at Karuizawa (we talked only in Japanese), he
explained why he had left Harvard. I feel quite sure that what he
had to say had a great deal to do with my final decision not to
become a candidate for the Ph.D. at either Harvard, Columbia or
Berkeley, but at Stanford where there was a Japanese professor of
Japanese history (Professor Ichihashi Yamato) but where I would not
receive a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship.

I should note here that I did not see Herbert again until
1946, when he was Canada's chief diplomatic officer in Tokyo. And
it was not long afterward that his name began to come up in
Washington hearings linked with the McCarthy witch-hunt because he
had been associated with groups and activities tagged as pro-
Communist. This was obviously a great embarrassment to Herbert.
We do not know for sure, but it is felt that these charges and
suspicions may have caused him to commit suicide in Cairo, where he
was then serving as Canada's ambassador to Egypt.

Lage: What a sad story.

Brown: Yes. I know he had some influence on my decision not to stay on in
Japan, and also on my not going to Harvard, Columbia, or Berkeley,
because even though that is where my scholarship said I should go,
those universities did not offer courses in history by professors
who knew Japanese and who used Japanese sources.

Lage: But Stanford did?

Brown: Stanford had a Japanese professor by the name of Yamato Ichihashi.

Lage: And you had studied wit i him as an undergraduate.

Brown: I had taken a course with him. And Professor Treat was also at

Stanford. So I felt that 1 could get better guidance in Japanese
history at Stanford, which had a professor who was teaching courses
in Japanese history and who knew the Japanese language. Even
Berkeley did not have such a professor of Japanese history at that
time.

Lage: Which was a situation you later remedied.
Brown: Right. [laughter]

III GRADUATE SCHOOL AND THE NAVY

Stanford University, and Professor Yamato Ichihashi

Brown: So I gave up the scholarship and applied for admission to the

Graduate Division at Stanford for work toward the Ph.D. in Japanese
history under Professor Yamato Ichihashi. That was probably a
mistake, because it turned out that Professor Ichihashi was not
deeply involved in Japanese historical research. His graduate
training had been in economics at Harvard, not in Japanese history.
He had received an appointment at Stanford to teach Japanese
history not because of achievement in that field but because he was
a Japanese who had received his Ph.D. at Harvard, and because
Professor Payson J. Treat (a specialist in Far Eastern diplomatic
history) and President David Starr Jordan (a marine biologist who
had spent some time in Japan) felt that Stanford should add a
specialist on Japan to its faculty. So he was given an appointment
in the history department.

Lage: He wasn't in the profession?

Brown: Yes. And there weren't many books at Stanford.
Lage: So the library wasn't adequate-
Brown: Yes, one could say that. I soon discovered that Professor

Ichihashi 's interest in Japanese history was quite limited. He was
making a special study in the remarkable cultural developments of
the eighth century and had taken voluminous notes on the art and
architecture of that Nara period. He was intrigued by the
remarkable changes made in Japan during those years, when the
country's leaders were avid students of the splendor of Chinese
T'ang culture and were adopting ambitious bureaucratic,
educational, religious, and economic reforms (usually following
Chinese models) that were indeed amazing. But as far as I know, he
never published anything in this field.

When I wrote my first seminar paper for Professor Ichihashi,
using documentary material on local Kaga history that I had
accumulated in Kanazawa, he seemed to have no interest whatsoever
in the history of that part of Japan in the sixteenth century.
Consequently he raised no questions, made no recommendations, and
volunteered no comments about the historical problem I had taken
up. Moreover, he expressed no interest in the Japanese sources I
had used and raised no questions about my translation of
specialized Japanese terms. Nothing was ever said about books and
articles (English or Japanese) that I might read. I even
discovered that neither Professor Ichihashi nor the Stanford
library had a file of the Shigaku Zasshi, the leading Japanese
historical journal (comparable to the American Historical Review in
the United States). Instead, he merely indicated words and
punctuation marks that should be added to, or removed from, my
English sentences.

Although he gave me an A for the paper, my disappointment was
great. I seriously considered moving to another graduate school.
But during the hours and days that I mulled over the problem of
working under a professor of history who seemed incapable of
stimulating, encouraging, or helping me to carry out research in
Japanese history, I finally concluded that moving to another
graduate school made no sense. It would not only take additional
time and money but would undoubtedly be interpreted as an academic
failure that would have to be overcome. So I decided to stick it
out: to say to myself and Mary that Professor Ichihashi 's unhelpful
and authoritarian samurai ways would not prevent me from getting
the Ph.D. degree and preparing myself for a career of teaching and
research in Japanese history.

Professor Lynn White

Lage : So what did you do for guidance?

Brown: I received guidance, stimulation, and encouragement from other

professors at Stanford, notably from Professor Payson J. Treat and
Professor Thomas Bailey (who showed me how a lecturer can stimulate
student interest in learning more about human experience in a
particular field of history) and from Professor Lynn White (whose
historical theories and explanations of developments in European
medieval history aroused in me a great curiosity about whether such
theories and explanations could be applied to similar developments
in Japanese medieval history) . Both my M.A. thesis on the
introduction and spread of firearms in medieval Japan and my Ph.D.
disse ta"ion on the use of coins in medieval Japan were reports on

research arising from an urge—aroused in courses taken from Lynn
White- -to find out whether firearms and money had affected the
course of history in Japan as they had in Europe.

Although both the M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation were
submitted to a committee headed by Professor Ichihashi, he provided
no bibliographical or analytical help for either. Moreover, no
Japanese sources for either study were found in the Stanford
library where Japanese holdings were then quite weak. (Nowadays
they are very strong). Therefore most of my research for the M.A.
thesis was done in materials found at Berkeley, and for my Ph.D.
dissertation in materials held by the East Asian Library at
Harvard.

Lage: You mean, the topics were European and you looked at it-
Brown: Yes, problems were raised by Lynn White in European history that I
felt should be raised in my study of Japanese history. For
example, Lynn White had a special interest in technology- -am I
getting too far off?

Lage: No, I think, without spending too much time, this is important.

Brown: Well, Lynn was a most stimulating historian. He was in his

thirties at that time, young but already a full professor and said
to be the most distinguished medievalist in the United States. He
was a fascinating lecturer and had this special interest in the
effects of particular technological advances on the subsequent
military, political, economic, and even religious life everywhere.
His lectures were fascinating, and attracted large numbers of
students.

Lage: Were these new questions that he was asking that people hadn't
asked before?

Brown: They were at least new for us, and very stimulating,
[tape interruption]

Lage: Okay, now we are back on after a phone conversation. We are
talking about Lynn White and his new theories.

Brown: In his technological studies, he was digging up information about
when the stirrup, for example, was first introduced to Europe.
Then he would tell us what happened after the stirrup was
introduced, which led to the fascinating conclusion that only after
the stirrup was introduced could soldiers fight while they were on
horseback. Otherwise, they would fall off. He felt that the whole
tradition of fighting on horseback was tied up with the spread of

knighthood in Europe. None of this could have happened if there
had been no stirrups.

So one of the first questions he raised with me was: How about
stirrups in Japan? He had seen and studied pictures of haniwa
(clay figurines placed around burial mounds erected all over Japan
during the Burial Mound age that came to a close in about 600 A.D.)
and had discovered that one of them was a representation of a man
riding a horse. And that the man had a stirrup on one foot. That
startled Lynn, especially when he learned that this particular
haniwa was probably made in about the fifth century. This meant
that it had been made two or three centuries before any known
evidence that stirrups were used in Europe. So he wanted to know
what sort of an effect the knowledge of stirrups had on warfare in
Japan. That was the subject of the first seminar paper that I
wrote under Lynn White.

Lage: The seminar was in medieval studies?

Brown: In medieval studies. At Stanford, we had to take an examination in
six fields of history. Japanese history was only one.

Lage: So everybody had to take a field of Japanese history?

Brown: No, no. Very few took that field, especially in those pre-war
years when so few budding historians had any interest in that
remote area of human culture. But all candidates for the Ph.D. in
history were required to take an oral examination—lasting several
hours — in six fields of history: the area in which one intended to
specialize and write his or her Ph.D. dissertation, and five
others. But there were at least a dozen fields. Therefore
candidates interested in modern American history could still select
six fields without studying Asian or African history. So not many
selected the Japanese or Far Eastern fields.

In the roughly forty years that Professor Ichihashi was at
Stanford he had only two Ph.D. dissertations written under him, one
by me and one by Dr. Nelson Spinks who did his research on the
Russo-Japanese War without using Japanese sources, and who later
joined the State Department as a foreign service officer. (I last
saw Nelson in Bangkok where, as I recall, he was consul general.)

My six fields were Japan (Ichihashi), Far Eastern Diplomatic
History (Treat), Medieval European history (White), English
history, modern U.S. history (Bailey), and Latin American history.
(I was also required to take a written examination in International
Law, as well as in French and German.)

The oral examination was an otdeal- -preparations for which
made me quite ill—that I will never forget. Professors in each
field had given me a long list of recommended books and articles;
and I simply did not have enough time to read them all carefully
and thoughtfully. Moreover, most of my professors (except Lynn
White) seemed to be interested mainly in historical events and
personalities, not in historical meaning and analysis; and for some
reason Lynn White was out of town on the day of the examination.

Although I passed, I felt I had really flunked every field
except Japanese history, and possibly U.S. history. In the
Japanese part of the examination, as 1 had expected, there were no
questions about developments about which I had written my M.A.
thesis and intended to write my Ph.D. dissertation. Professor
Ichihashi did, however, ask bibliographical questions that enabled
me to parade the names of unfamiliar Japanese titles.

Meeting the foreign- language requirements for the Ph.D. also
created considerable dissatisfaction, mainly because the languages
I needed most (Japanese and Chinese) were not listed as languages
that would satisfy language requirements for the Ph.D. As I have
said, Nelson Spinks had received his Ph.D. without using Japanese
sources, and Japanese was not then taught at Stanford.

Except for the courses in European medieval history, and the
papers on Japanese historical problems that emerged from those
courses, my three years of graduate work at Stanford were not
intellectually exciting. Consequently at the end of my oral
examination ordeal, my old curiosity about the evolution of human
experience in Japan was nearly gone. And since Stanford's holdings
in Japanese materials were virtually nonexistent, and there was no
possibility of getting to Japan for research, I felt very little
excitement about research on my chosen topic: the circulation and
use of coins during Japan's sixteenth-century period of political
centralization. That was undoubtedly one reason I began listening
--in the summer of 1941--to army, marine, and navy officers who
approached me about taking a commission that would permit me to use
my knowledge of Japanese in intelligence work.

Lage: How did you come to be interested in coinage?

Brown: Again it started with what I had heard and read in Lynn White's

courses in medieval European history. As I have said, while I was
in Japan I had become interested in the study of Maeda Toshiie who
was an important figure in the amazing developments of the
sixteenth century. So I could not but be interested in the
emergence of comparable changes in Europe at that time, and in how
Lynn White explained them.

It was because of his ideas about the importance of guns in
medieval European history that I got into the problem of how the
introduction and spread of guns--in the middle of the sixteenth
century—were related to the military successes of Japan's great
centralizers: Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-
1598), and Tokugawa leyasu (1542-1616). My findings were written
up as my M.A. thesis.

And that question was connected with my interest in precious
metals and coinage in Japan, for I had read that silver mining had
become important in Japan during the sixteenth century, and Lynn
White was arguing that the discovery of precious metals in
Czechoslovakia, and the discovery and importation of massive
amounts from the New World, had paved the way for Europe's
commercial revolution.

He also asked if there were comparable developments in Japan?
What I had picked up suggested that there was, but I needed answers
to a number of related questions: How much new silver was being
mined in Japan during those days? How was this related to the
production and distribution of coins? Did coins and monetary
exchange have a meaningful connection with Japan's incipient
commercial revolution, and was the centralization process in turn
tied up with expansive foreign trade (centered on the exportation
of silver) and a succession of military victories (centered on the
production and use of guns by the great centralizers)? I began to
feel that by looking into the question of money I could begin to
understand why and how Japan, too, was moving rapidly toward a
commercial revolution in the sixteenth century, and why and how the
political and social fragmentation that characterized Japanese
society before 1550 was rapidly giving way to the relatively
unified political and cultural order that characterized society of
the Edo Period, which began early in the seventeenth century.

Lage: So money enabled the trade and commerce?

Brown: Yes, you have to have an adequate supply of money for trade to
thrive.

Lage: On the other hand, they may not have developed gold and silver

mines if gold and silver were not needed for money, because trade
was--

Brown: That's right. Because they needed a good medium of exchange, they
placed great value on precious metals.

Anyway, it was in the sixteenth century that they discovered
important silver mines. And at that time there was a great demand

for silver in China as well as an increasing demand for it in
Japan.

Lage: You found correspondences?

Brown: Yes, and that was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation.

Lage: So Lynn White had quite an influence.

Brown: He did.

Lage: He sounds like a very inquiring mind.

Brown: He was. Later he became president of Mills College and after

several years there he returned to the teaching of medieval history
at UCLA and was elected president of the American Historical
Association.

As a matter of fact--I guess I can tell about this now--I was
chairman of the history department at Berkeley when Lynn resigned
from his position at Mills. From a friend of his, we heard that
Lynn would be interested in an appointment at Berkeley. I was
delighted at the possibility of being associated with him as a
colleague in the same history department. But I did not hear much
enthusiasm from my colleagues whose teaching and research were in
the general area of European history. At that time--I will get
into that later--our sights were pretty high, and many thought that
Lynn, having been in an administrative position so long, would no
longer be a productive and creative historian. So we didn't make
him an offer, but UCLA did.

Lage: Was he about your age?

Brown: He was a little older. He must be five or six years older.

Lage: Because you weren't a young student when you came back to Stanford.
You were maybe more mature than the--

Brown: Yes. When I came back to Stanford in '38, I was twenty-nine and he
was five or six years older.

Lage: Were there other professors at Stanford that were particularly
important for you?

Brown: Before we leave Lynn White, I should say, too, that he was very
much interested in the history of Christianity. He took the
position that you really couldn't understand medieval history
without understanding the role of the church and Christianity. His
courses paid a lot of attention to that. That, too, may have had

something to do with my later interest in religion in Japan, I
don't know. He had a lot of influence on me, I must say. Whenever
I would write something I would always seek his reaction to it.

Lage: Even later?

Brown: Even later. After he went to UCLA, he was appointed chairman of
the Budget Committee on that campus at just the same time that I
was serving as chairman of the Budget Committee at Berkeley. That
meant that we were both on the statewide Budget Committee at the
same time, and for some reason I was made chairman of that
committee.

Lage: Did you have a good relationship with him?
Brown: Oh, yes. It was very pleasant.

Lage: Very nice. It is nice to see those ongoing influences. Was there
anything in the teaching styles that would be worthy of note as it
might have affected you, negatively or positively?

Brown: The kind of enthusiasm and ideas he had surely influenced all his
students. I suppose I tried to emulate him in some way or another
as I tried to lecture.

Professor Fagan of Economics

Brown: Another professor at Stanford had a great influence on my teaching.
That was Professor Fagan in the economics department, from whom I
was taking a course in public finance. He was a vivacious and
enthusiastic lecturer who, from the beginning to the end of every
lecture, constantly walked back and forth on the platform,
constantly used the blackboard not only to write names and terms
that were important but to make checks and marks of various types
to emphasize what he was saying. His use of the blackboard was
very effective. At the end of the hour it was a meaningless mess,
but in making the mess he had added life and interest to everything
said. Even now, I tend to do a lot of writing on the blackboard as
I lecture, surely because of the Fagan influence.

Lage: Kind of a way of punctuating--

Brown: Yes, that's right. If he wanted to emphasize something, he would
write the word on the blackboard and underline it and then circle
it or put exclamation marks around it.

Lage: It draws attention and keeps attention. Why were you taking public
finance?

Brown: That was a course I took in my undergraduate years, when I was

planning on becoming a lawyer and before I had gone to Japan and
was drawn into Japanese studies. That makes the Fagan influence
all the more remarkable, especially since my thinking about public
spending and saving (spending in times of depression and saving in
times of prosperity) still has a Fagan stamp.

Another Stanford professor that I will not forget is Professor
Chen (I probably have the name wrong) who was my Chinese teacher
for a year. I had come to realize the importance of Chinese for
the study of Japanese history and therefore decided that I should
learn how to read Chinese historical materials. But Professor
Ichihashi recommended against studying Chinese, saying that would
be a waste of time.

Lage: Oh, a little nationalism there. [laughter]

Brown: Maybe, I am not sure. But I decided that I should study Chinese

anyway, and Professor Chen permitted me to take his course without
registering or obtaining an official grade. I never told Professor
Ichihashi that I was studying Chinese.

Lage: Were there very many correspondences in the language? Was it a lot
easier learning Chinese?

Brown: Oh, yes. The Japanese also use Chinese characters.
Lage: Are the words at all similar?

Brown: The words are entirely different; Japanese and Chinese are two
different languages. It was the reading that I was mostly
interested in. So, I worked pretty hard on Chinese. I took the
examinations like everybody else, but I couldn't get any grade,
[laughter] I enjoyed that work and learned a good deal from it.

Professor Payson J. Treat

Brown: Let's see, about other teachers--! worked a good deal under

Professor Payson J. Treat, who was a very distinguished diplomatic
historian and a stimulating lecturer.

Lage: What was his area, was it Europe?

Brown: No, it was mostly relations between Japan, China, and the United

States, from the point of view of the United States. It was really
a course in American diplomatic history in the Far East. He had
done a good deal of writing in the field of United States relations
with Japan and China, but he didn't know either of those languages.

He was a great teacher. He was very much interested in his
students. He worked hard on his lectures. He was highly respected
and did a lot of writing. He was stimulating to work with because
of his teaching. But I had problems because he was embarrassed, I
guess that is the way to put it, by having a student who could read
Japanese, and he couldn't. He said once that he should have done
it, but he just didn't feel like he could devote that much time to
it, and never got around to it. But I must say, he was very
supportive. I had a course from him when I was an undergraduate.
When I got to graduate school, I did a lot of work under him. My
Far Eastern field was under him.

Lage: Did he try to get you to use your Japanese in some of the areas
where it would help him?

Brown: No. I sort of felt that he was not interested in things that I
might pick up in Japanese.

Lage: He would rather stick with the American side of it?
Brown: Right. [laughs]

Master's Thesis on Firearms in Sixteenth-Century Japan

Lage: Are there other professors that we should mention? And I do want
to ask you about the library. You mentioned there wasn't much of
it.

Brown: Oh, yes, about the library. As a result of the library being so

weak, when I worked on my M.A. thesis on f irearms--the introduction
and spread of firearms in sixteenth-century Japan--! did all of my
research at Berkeley.

Lage: So Berkeley had the sources?

Brown: Berkeley's was not that good, but they had some materials that 1
could use, and I got quite a lot of information from a famous
historical encyclopedia of sources which Berkeley had. In looking
into it on such subjects as guns, I got excerpts from sources in

chronological order about guns--when they were used, introduced,
made, and so on.

I was able to pick up considerable information that indicated
that guns were first introduced by the Portuguese in 1549 and that
within twenty or thirty years, most of the big armies had at least
a third of their soldiers equipped with guns. Warfare was being
changed as a result of these guns, and the generals who were making
guns were usually successful. They were the ones who were
gradually unifying Japan under one central government.

A chaotic political situation had prevailed for a couple
hundred years before the sixteenth century. But suddenly, after
the introduction and the spread of firearms, generals emerged who
gradually brought the whole country under one central government.
The making and use of guns seemed to have something to do with it.

Lage: It's interesting, while you were studying guns and firearms, this

military situation-
Brown: Again, that came from Lynn White, who talked about what happened

after guns were introduced in Europe and how this affected warfare,
politics, and a lot of other things. But in Japan, the case was
simpler in a way, because you didn't have to wait for the guns to
develop; they came in as highly developed weapons. Therefore, the
impact was more definite, clear, and sharp. You could see the
effects of these changes. Within thirty or forty years after guns
were first introduced to Japan, battles were fought in quite a
different way.

Guns were being fired behind breastworks as early as the
1580s. This meant, for example, during the time of Hideyoshi (the
great general who succeeded in bringing the whole of Japan under
one rule after the assassination of his predecessor, Oda Nobunaga,
in 1582) there developed a strategy of placing gunners behind
breastworks. Since they weren't very effective out in the open,
the strategy was to get the enemy to attack and let his gunners sit
there waiting for the enemy to approach. He broke up his gunners
into three groups. While the first group was firing guns, the
other two were getting ready to fire. You had the principle of
continuous fire, constant gunfire with only one-third of the guns
being fired at a given time. And they could do this only behind
breastworks. So the idea was to get the enemy to attack. By
maintaining constant gunfire, they could mow down the enemy
soldiers as they approached. This basic strategy was used by
Hideyoshi in all his major battles.

Then there was a showdown, later on, with one of his generals:
Tokugawa ".eyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa clan and the Shogun.

In that engagement both generals used the same strategy, trying to
get the other to attack. They had their soldiers waiting behind
embankments for the enemy to attack. They even sent messages
accusing each other of being too cowardly to attack. But both
waited patiently for the other to attack. And so there was no
battle.

Lage: They both had trained in the same strategy! [laughter]

Brown: Finally, they came to terms and became allies. So that was the
subject of my M.A. thesis, and I did all of that work here at
Berkeley.

Then for my Ph.D., I went into coins. I really was not able
to get much done on that before I got into the U.S. Navy.

Lage: So that is our next topic.

Brown: Should I say something here about the materials needed for
research?

Lage: Yes.

Brown: When I was working on my dissertation after the war, I went not to
Berkeley this time, but to Harvard.

Lage: So you finally gave up and went to Harvard?

Brown: Yes, I went there for dissertation research. Professor Elisseeff
was still there, and he was very helpful. The library had many
Japanese collected works that included valuable materials on
mining, coinage, and exchange. I spent six months at Harvard,
working all day long, day after day, in the library. Then I
returned to Stanford in June in order to complete and submit my
dissertation.

Lage: So you weren't being directed at all at Harvard, just using their
sources?

Brown: I was enrolled. [laughing] I was on the G.I. Bill at that time.
Lage: And you were enrolled at Harvard?

Brown: At Harvard. I was enrolled on some kind of an individual study
program under Professor Elisseeff. I saw him once a week. That
was mostly to ask him questions about things I couldn't understand
in my reading. I must say, I was impressed with him. Usually the
questions I would ask, he couldn't answer. But he would say,
"Let's find out." He would start working through dictionaries, and

we would work on it until we could figure it out. I was impressed
by his being able to say that he didn't know and then patiently
work it out with me.

Naval Intelligence Officer. 1940-1945

Lage: Should we get into your war service? It is a big topic, but it
must have been important.

Brown: All right. I spent over five years in the U.S. Navy.
Lage: Yes, how did you get into it?

Brown: Officers from all three branches of the military service approached
me during the spring of 1940--after I had managed to pass the Ph.D.
oral examination- -about applying for a commission. Each said his
service was in need of officers who knew Japanese, and pointed out
that only a few American men of military age knew enough Japanese
to be useful. And since I had lost much of my old excitement for
research, and felt that it was no longer possible to avoid war with
Japan, I expressed interest.

Finally 1 applied for a commission in the marines and was
asked to appear at an office in San Francisco for an Japanese
examination given by Colonel Laswell, who I later worked with in
Pearl Harbor. Colonel Laswell had been sent to Japan for three
years of intensive study of Japanese during the 1930s. In those
pre-war years every branch of the military service, as well as the
State Department, had several men making a three-year intensive
study of the language at any given time. And apparently an equal
number of Japanese officers were engaged in an equally intensive
study of English in the United States. Colonel Laswell had been
one of those language officers.

Lage: This was accepted?

Brown: Yes, this was apparently the subject of a bilateral agreement. I

became personally acquainted with three: Ural Johnson who became an
American ambassador to Japan; another foreign service officer, Bill
Yuni, who became consul general in Kobe; and an army officer who
eventually was promoted to the rank of general. The latter was
stationed in Kanazawa for the third year of his training—the
Japanese government had assigned him to the army division located
there. I remember being impressed with the conscientious and
methodical way this American army officer—who was living with his
wife in a nice foreign-style home— was studying Japanese.

And Colonel Laswell, who tested my Japanese for a commission
in the marines, had also studied Japanese full-time in Japan for
three years. The passages that he tested me on had obviously been
taken from a textbook that he had studied, presumably one that had
been studied during his third year of his stay. I was surprised
that it was so simple, suggesting that my own study of the
language- -never in an established program under professional
teachers--had probably given me a better command of the language
than they had achieved, but of course their study had been centered
on military language and mine on history.

Then I had a physical examination for admission to the marine
corps. Here I was, a five-foot-six runt, lined up with other
candidates who were all big, strapping fellows. When the doctor
came to tap on my heart, or whatever he was doing, he looked at his
file and he said, "They must really need you bad!" [laughter]
Apparently he had orders to pass me no matter what. My eyes were
not that good either.

I was in the process of receiving a commission in the marines
when I was approached by a naval officer. (Earlier I had also been
approached by an army officer but had expressed no interest since I
had already applied for a commission in the marines.) But when I
told the navy officer that I was about to receive a commission in
the marines, he said: "We can handle that. After all, the marine
corps is part of the navy." He said that the navy had a special
need for men with my kind of ability, which was in reading rather
than in speaking or hearing. He pointed out that the marines would
value me as an interpreter out in the field, whereas the navy
wanted men like me who could read. Since I realized that reading
was my strong point, I could not but express interest. But I had
to remind him that I had gone rather far toward being commissioned
in the marines and said that I didn't think he could engineer a
change at that late point. But he did.

Shortly, I received a notice that I was to appear at the U.S.
Naval Intelligence Office in San Francisco for an examination in
oral and written Japanese. The examination was by Dictaphone.
When I turned it on, I was asked to write out the English
equivalent of a certain Japanese article that was in a Japanese
newspaper on the desk. Then I was asked to write in English what
was being said in Japanese on the Dictaphone—this was spoken by
someone who obviously knew Japanese very well. (I knew the speaker
was not a Japanese man, because I had heard that there were no
Japanese in the navy, not even American Japanese.) I never once
saw or met the person who was examining me. But later on, after I
was assigned to duty with the Naval Intelligence Office in San
Francisco, I met and worked with him. He never identified himself

during the examination because he was an undercover civil servant
of naval intelligence.

He was Bill Magistretti, who was a very interesting and
capable man. While attending high school in San Francisco, he had
made friends with Japanese classmates and developed an interest in
learning the Japanese language well. He therefore went to Japan
and gained admission to a Japanese middle school, a public school
for the education of boys after they had completed six years of
elementary school. He attended that middle school for five years
(apparently dressing in a Japanese school uniform and complying
with all middle school regulations) and graduated close to the top
of his class.

After returning to the United States, which was three or four
years before the outbreak of war between Japan and the United
States, he entered the University of California at Berkeley and
took some kind of special program that allowed him to graduate
within a year or two. Then he was picked up by the navy as a
civilian employee to work in the Office of Naval Intelligence. He
continued to amaze me with his ability to reel off the readings of
Japanese first names, which is hard for most native speakers of the
language. I was soon ordered to duty in Pearl Harbor, but he
stayed on in San Francisco. Toward the end of the war he was made
a foreign service officer in the State Department. And when I was
in Hong Kong in 1953-54, we spent an evening with him and his wife.
It turned out that although he had this remarkable proficiency in
Japanese, he had not yet been assigned to duty in Japan.

Lage: Did you also have a strong sense that the war was coming?

Brown: Yes. I hated to see it come, but it just seemed like it was
inevitable. Everyone seemed to think that. Of course, I had
gained a first-hand sense of what the Japanese army had in mind,
and witnessed the intensity of their interest in the whole of Asia.
It looked like war could not be avoided.

I have been puzzled about my thinking at that time. I don't
know precisely what I was thinking, but I had to reflect about it
when my son, Ren, became a conscientious objector at the time of
the Vietnam War. Talking to him about his objections to that war
made me wonder why I had not objected to war against Japan. I had
accepted a commission in the navy a few months before the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, but the attack left no doubt that I had
made the right decision.

Lage: Do you think you were more conflicted than the average person,
though, having lived in Japan, with friends there and all?

Brown: Sure. I know that I wouldn't have felt good about killing a
Japanese, but they were obviously--as a nation—intent upon
fighting and killing us. My direct contact with Japanese military
men in Kanazawa, and with Japanese soldiers during my visit to
Korea in 1933 and to Peking in 1935, convinced me that the military
(as well as the state which became increasingly dominated by the
military) had embarked on a course of action (later called
aggression) that could be stopped only by military defeat. I
should also say that I was never engaged directly in military
combat, working always at a desk, first in San Francisco and for
the remainder of the war in Pearl Harbor.

Lage: What were your assignments? What did they put you to work doing
with your Japanese?

Brown: After I got in the navy in San Francisco--! was there for several
months--! was made responsible for investigating the Japanese in
California, to see if I could find evidence of sabotage, or
espionage. My work was mainly looking through Japanese newspapers
that were published on the West Coast. There were a lot of
newspapers up and down the coast published in Japanese for persons
who read Japanese. A lot of the newspapers had both English and
Japanese sections, one for those who could read Japanese and the
other for those who could read English. Those were the materials
that I worked with.

But before I was shipped out, there came this problem about
whether or not to move the Japanese away from the West Coast. I
was asked to write the report for Naval Intelligence. I remember
writing it and remember concluding that there was no evidence that
any Japanese American had ever been involved in espionage. There
was no sense that any one of these Americans had ever been disloyal
to the United States or done anything to support the Japanese
cause. I had to say that, and I did say that. But the army, which
apparently was the unit making the decision, had already decided to
evacuate the Japanese. My report had no influence on its decision.

I don't know anything about that decision process but I wonder
if it wasn't something that the public was demanding. So what I
wrote didn't really matter.

Lage: They weren't listening to facts.

Brown: No. The decision had more or less been made for them, I think. I
don ' t know .

Lage: That's interesting, that you did write the report, and you had been
the one who read all the papers. Were there several people doing
the same sort of work?

Brown: Yes, there were two or three of us. This man that examined me was
in this field too. We did a few other things.

Lage: Did you ever go out and talk to Japanese Americans?

Brown: Not much. There was telephoning tapping. I would listen to some
of that.

Lage: Of people that particularly might have been under surveillance?

Brown: Yes.

Lage: That is an interesting part of your career.

Brown: One of the things being done then was to broadcast programs to the
Japanese in Japanese, telling them what we wanted them to know
about the war.

Lage: The Japanese Americans in California?

Brown: To Japanese everywhere, even in Japan. I do not know where the
programs were initiated, but one of my jobs was to check them.
They wanted to be certain that wrong words and phrases were not
getting into the broadcasts.

Lage: I see. Did you find any strange things?

Brown: No.

Lage: So then you were transferred to Hawaii?

Brown: Yes, that was because a commander came into the office from Hawaii
one day, asking if there was anyone there who knew Japanese. He
said that the Office of Combat Intelligence in Pearl Harbor was in
urgent need of such officers. Magistretti had such a capability,
as did my wife Mary who had a desk in the same room with me.

Lage: Well, that is nice.

Brown: But this commander was not interested in Magistretti or Mary. They
were not commissioned officers. But he was intently interested in
me. He asked about the kind of work I was doing and was clearly
not impressed with its urgency. Although I had just received
orders for naval training at Fort Schuyler in New York, as soon as
this commander got back to Washington I received new orders that
all previous orders were to be cancelled and that I should proceed
to Pearl Harbor by the first available air transportation. So I
never received any formal naval training and was on duty in Pearl
Harbor for the remainder of the war.

Pearl Harbor

Lage: You could just as well have been a civilian.

Brown: Right, that is a good point. The civilians they needed were all

given commissions, especially in intelligence. We had thousands in
our office—at first called Combat Intelligence—but every single
person was either a naval officer or enlisted man and were all
white males, certainly no Japanese and no blacks.

Lage: But they all spoke Japanese, these you were working with?

Brown: Yes, but before I get into that I would like to tell of an

experience I had on my flight to Hawaii by a Pan American seaplane.
We took off from Treasure Island—after about four failures to get
the plane to rise up out of the water—with all windows blacked out
so that we could not be easily sighted by the enemy. It was a
spacious plane with sleeping compartments, tables around which four
passengers sat, and open spaces where we could stand or walk
around— not at all like the cramped seating on a plane today.

I sat at a table opposite a young naval flier whose name was
O'Hare. I knew that he was a flier because he had wings on his
uniform and, although obviously a few years younger than I was, had
the rank of commander or lieutenant commander. I was not surprised
at his high rank--I was then only a lieutenant junior grade—
because I knew that fliers were often promoted rapidly. And his
name meant nothing to me. I had been so busy getting ready for the
trip, that I had not been reading the newspapers, and there was
then no airport at Chicago called the O'Hare Airport. You know
that name, don't you?

Lage: Oh, yes. Goodness.

Brown: Well, O'Hare was the man sitting across the table from me. But
when he introduced himself, the name rang no bells, and we
proceeded to talk about this and that for a couple of hours without
his indicating that he was anything more than an ordinary navy
flier. Then we got up for a stroll around the plane, and I began
talking to another passenger, who asked: "Do you know who that man
was your have been sitting with?" And when I said "No", he clued
me in. For several days, a young naval flier by the name of O'Hare
had been given "a key to the city" by the mayors of one American
city after another all over the United States. He had been honored
by parades, dinners, and cheering crowds and had even been invited
to the White House where he was greeted by President Roosevelt and
given an accelerated promotion to the rank of commander. Imagine!

When I returned to the table and rejoined O'Hare, I must have
acted somewhat differently. But he never said anything about his
having received such great honors, or about his single-handedly
shooting down six Japanese zero fighters off the island of
Guadalcanal.

Lage: He probably appreciated somebody who could just talk to him.

Brown: That's right. He wasn't interested in talking about all those
things. He didn't talk about himself like I am talking now.
[laughter] Then when we got to Hawaii, he knew and understood,
apparently, that I was there for the first time. So he took me to
the navy officer's club, showed me how to get there, and even
carried one of my bags. Then, a few days later, I read in the
newspaper that he had been killed in a training exercise near
Hawaii.

Lage: After all he had done, he was killed on kind of a--

Brown: Twenty- five years or so later, I was taking a flight to Washington
and I was hung up in Chicago. As I was going around through the
airport, I saw a plaque about the O'Hare Airport, and for the first
time I realized that the O'Hare Airport was named after the man I
had met on the way to Hawaii.

In Hawaii I reported to duty at a place that was then
identified as Combat Intelligence, which was in the basement of a
big building in the main part of Pearl Harbor. I was first
indoctrinated into various sections of the office. The most
interesting and maybe the important part of the indoctrination was
learning about the use and the potentialities of IBM machines,
which were not like IBM computers today, but they had sorters,
punchers, printers, and various other machines that were used for
analyzing information.

Lage: It was sort of the precursor to the computer?

Brown: Yes, they were the most sophisticated machines available then, and
were used extensively and intensively.

Lage: The cards that are punched?

Brown: That's right. Basic data were placed on cards and then sorted and
printed up for different purposes. These printouts, bound into
huge volumes, were used for our cryptoanalytical work.

I think it was on my first day in that office that the
commanding officer made this amazing statement: "This is not a
normal kind of duty. Here we take the position that if you feel

message sent out by Japan's naval headquarters. Gradually it
became quite clear that a powerful naval attack was being ordered
against a particular U.S. naval base. But the name and place of
that base was designated by a code-letter K, as I recall, which had
not been used in previous messages. And so the office was not sure
which base would be the target of attack.

Then, the book tells us, Commander Finnegan had a hunch that K
stood for Midway. But he had to be sure. So he developed the
scheme of having an American plane fly over the island of Midway
and radio a message, in plain English, about what it was doing and
where it was going. Not long afterward a Japanese message was
intercepted stating that an American plan flying over K had radioed
such and such a message. In that way Admiral Nimitz learned of the
Japanese plan to attack Midway. He immediately ordered all his
ships (most of which were then in Australian waters) to head for
Pearl Harbor for refueling, and then to proceed to Midway. There a
historic naval battle was fought, generally considered to have been
the turning point in the Pacific War.

Lage: So it was important work you were doing.

Brown: Yes. Admiral Nimitz once came in to see us. We were working right
under his office, and nearby. He told us once that our office and
the work we were doing was as valuable to him as another fleet.

Lage: Interesting. Now, your wife got sent over, I read.

Brown: Oh, you saw that? Well, that's a long story. Do you want me to
get into that?

Lage: I don't know. Let's just note it, because maybe we don't need to-
Brown: It sort of got me into trouble. I was in trouble with the navy
twice. Once was over her, and another was over something else I
can get into. I was at a cocktail party once in Hawaii and was
talking to a general connected with Military Intelligence in
Honolulu. My interest in Japan and the Japanese came up.
Eventually, I must have said something about Mary having been born
and raised in Japan, and working with Naval Intelligence in San
Francisco. He said, "Oh, we need people like that out here." I
said, "Well, I need her too, but I can't get her out here because
of the regulation against navy dependents coming to Hawaii."

Lage: For safety's sake, or to keep you fellows busy?

Brown: It was assumed, I suppose, that if wives and children were

permitted to live in Hawaii, officers and enlisted men would not

work so hard and might even try to avoid sea duty. Probably there
were security reasons as well. 1 don't know.

So there was no possibility of getting Mary (a navy wife) to
Hawaii. The general said, "I know about that regulation. But if
we need her, we can get her." [laughing] I said, "Luck to you."
I tried to stay out of it, saying, "You have to do everything,
because as a navy officer I can't do anything about getting my wife
over here." He said, "I know that."

So pretty soon my wife began indicating, in her letters, that
overtures were being made about her going to Hawaii. She even
indicated when she was arriving, but I made the mistake of
inquiring about when her ship was to arrive. That indicated that I
as a navy officer (I had my uniform on) was asking about the
arrival of his wife.

So I was called into the office of a man that I later used to
see at the golf course. He was then a commander, as I recall,
whose job it was to enforce this regulation. He asked me--I think
I was a lieutenant commander- -no, a lieutenant. He said,
"Lieutenant, don't you know that there is a regulation against navy
wives coming to Hawaii?" I said, "I do." "What's going on!" he
said. He was very rough. I told him, and he said, "They didn't
tell us that she was a navy wife. My advice to you, young man"--I
still remember this--"is to get word to her to go back home,
because if she gets over, I am going to send her back on the very
next boat." So I said, "Yes, sir" and left. As I passed the desk
of the yeoman who was on duty outside the commander's office, he
said, "You know, you could be court martialled for something like
this ! "

I went immediately to the army intelligence office in Honolulu
to see the general who had said he would take care of the matter.
But when I left the elevator on the floor where the general's
office was located, an army officer stepped up and asked, "Are you
Lieutenant Brown?" And as soon as I said I was, he said, "Before
you talk to anyone here, Commander So-and-So at Pearl Harbor wants
you to return to his office in Pearl Harbor immediately."
[laughter] When I started up the steps to his floor of the
administration building in Pearl Harbor, the commander was waiting
for me, although it was then the noon hour. He said, now quite
decently, "I didn't realize your wife was so important."
[laughter] He had apparently looked into his files and found that
Mary's coming to Hawaii had been approved at a high level.

Lage: Pretty high up, probably.

Brown: Yes, pretty high ip, and he couldn't do anything about it.

Lage: So it was important work you were doing.

Lage: Interesting. Now, your wife got sent over, I read.

Brown: Oh, you saw that? Well, that's a long story. Do you want me to
get into that?

Lage: For safety's sake, or to keep you fellows busy?

Brown: It was assumed, I suppose, that if wives and children were

permitted to live in Hawaii, officers and enlisted men would not

work so hard and might even try to avoid sea duty. Probably there
were security reasons as well. I don't know.

Lage: Pretty high up, probably.

Brown: Yes, pretty high \p, and he couldn't do anything about it.

I had another run-in with him because a few months later, the
newspapers reported that the navy had decided to have a shipload of
children, whose parents (civilian or military) were living in
Hawaii, brought back home.

Lage: Had they been sent to the mainland?

Brown: Yes. A number of children had been evacuated at the beginning of
the war, and if the parents were still there, their children could
now be brought home. Although our case was different, it looked as
though it might be possible to get our five-year-old daughter
Charlotte included.

Lage: Oh, I see, I didn't know you had children by then.

Brown: Yes, Charlotte was born in Palo Alto while I was doing graduate
work at Stanford. She was such a beautiful and smart child that
she put on a show everywhere we went. She and my sister Margie,
who was then living with us and attending San Jose State College,
made those difficult years of graduate study a quite happy time.

Lage: She stayed over with whom?

Brown: She stayed with my father and mother in Santa Ana after Mary left
for Hawaii. But we missed her and were thrilled by the thought
that she might be brought to Hawaii. But again I realized that
there was this navy regulation and decided that Mary, not I, should
fill out the forms for having children brought back to Hawaii. So
Mary took over, and I tried to keep out of the picture. The
request was approved; my parents were notified; a lady was employed
as her guardian; and Charlotte boarded the ship in San Francisco.
The trip was apparently quite terrifying for Charlotte who, at that
early age, was not only separated from all members of the family
but was on a ship that was constantly zigzagging to avoid being hit
by any torpedo fired by a Japanese submarine. She still remembers
unpleasant incidents that occurred on that voyage.

Somewhere along the line, but before Charlotte had actually
arrived, this same tough commander called me into his office, and
as I entered his door he said, "What are you up to now?"
[laughter]

Lage: Was this all very gruff?

Brown: Oh, yes.

Lage: He wasn't laughing as you are now?

Brown: No, he was serious about it. Actually angry. I had gotten under
his skin. I told him what my wife had done and that we had
obtained assurances that having our daughter brought to Hawaii was
both proper and legal. He thought and fumed, and finally said:
"Well, I don't think I can do anything about it. But the next time
I see you, I suppose you will be trying to get your grandmother
over here!" [laughter]

I had another run-in with a high-ranking naval officer, but
this was with the admiral who was my own commanding officer at the
Joint Intelligence Office of the Pacific Ocean Area. This incident
came after I had been on duty in that office for two or three
years, and when I had become one of the six officers (four were
Annapolis men and two of us were reserve officers) that took turns
serving as senior officer present (SOP) during the night hours when
the more senior officers were never on duty. During the day we
would be out-ranked by two or three senior officers, but at night--
which was often the time of actual combat at sea and when the
office was running full tilt, but when the admiral and a few
officers immediately under him were almost never present—one of us
had to be on duty. At those times we were responsible for
everything done or not done by some 2,000 officers and enlisted men
who were then present. So when I was on night duty, I had a number
of responsibilities not connected directly with cryptoanalysis.

The next time I came on daytime duty, I was told that the
admiral wanted to see me right away. The two officers whose rank
placed them between me and the admiral (both Annapolis men) went
with me into his office. The admiral—obviously quite angry-
handed me a copy of telegraphic message to Washington and asked if
that was my signature. I said that it was. He then asked me if I
approved the wording of that message. I said that I didn't know
because I had not yet read it. He then blurted out: "Do you mean
that you sign messages that you have not read?" When I replied,
"Yes, sir!" he became almost livid and was not very receptive to
the explanation that it had been presented to me at a very busy
time of the night and that the yeoman had assured me there was no
reason why I should take the time to read the several messages
before signing them. I may even have said that I was working on a
Japanese message that I felt needed my attention more than those
routine messages to Washington. Anyway I was not contrite, and
that may have upset him more than my signing an unread message.

Lage: I can imagine.

Brown: I learned later that the admiral had been assigned to the Joint
Intelligence Center of the Pacific Ocean Area with the
understanding that he would improve relations between that office
and the one in Washington. And the message that I had signed was

worded in a way that probably worsened relations. It said
something like this: "Why don't you guys get off your duff and
answer that question we put to you about ten hours ago?"

On the way back to our desks from the admiral's office, one of
the Annapolis officers that had gone in with me made this
interesting remark: "Man, it is wonderful to be a reserve officer!"
[laughter] He went on to say that for a regular officer in the
navy, something might have been added to his fitness report that
would block promotion.

Lage: It could affect your career.

Brown: Definitely. But as a reserve officer, I didn't care about that.

The worst thing they could do would be to send me back home, which
wouldn't be too bad.

Lage: They needed you, anyway.

Brown: They needed me, and I guess I must have realized that, and he
realized that. So I didn't hear anything more about it.
[laughter]

Lage: I think we need to finish up for today, but to complete talking

about the war- -this is a hard topic at the end- -we need to record
your reaction to the dropping of the bomb on Japan.

Brown: Do you want to get into that now?

Lage: Should we just try to finish up with some thoughts about that?

Brown: All right. I remember when that happened. I had no advance notice
of it. Maybe some of my officer superiors, the Annapolis people
around might have known it, but I doubt if they knew about it
either. It was kept pretty quiet. I happened to be at a friend's
house in Honolulu when I heard about the dropping of the bomb. It
was a blow. So I remember precisely what I was doing when I heard
about it. It was something quite hard to digest, to get used to.
It reminded me of looking at that Pacific Ocean for the first time,
which made me dizzy. The whole idea of a bomb as destructive as
that is kind of hard to understand and to deal with. Of course, we
didn't know then about the extent of the damage caused, but it was
obviously horrendous. The problem was much talked about,
especially about whether it was right to use such a weapon of mass
destruction.

Lage: Did people talk about it at that time?

Brown: Yes, there was talk about it, even in the navy. But I think there
was a general feeling, or hope, that this might help bring the war
to an end quickly—that maybe this was necessary to make the
Japanese surrender. I think most of the Japanese would say, too,
that if it hadn't been for that bomb, they would not have
surrendered as soon as they did. The war would have dragged on
much longer.

Lage: You having lived there, the people of Japan were much more real to
you.

Brown: Yes, I couldn't help but feel the hurt and the suffering that was
caused by all that bombing of cities. I did go to Japan in 1948,
about three years after the war was over. I saw huge sections of
Tokyo and Yokohama that had been burned out, not by the atomic
bomb, but by other bombs that were very destructive. Three- fourths
of the city of Tokyo was pretty much burned out or gutted. It was
a horrible sight to see.

Lage: Just by conventional bombing?
Brown: Right.

Lage: That is sort of forgotten, because the A-bomb has all the
attention, but conventional- -

Brown: Well, the A-bombs hit those two cities (Nagasaki and Hiroshima),
and that was spectacular. The destruction was horrible in those
two places, but nearly every city of Japan was bombed out.
Kanazawa was not bombed and Kyoto and Nara were skipped, but most
other big cities were devastated, many people killed or left
homeless. Life there was pretty miserable for a long time
afterwards .

Lage: On that sad note, let's finish for today.
Brown: Yes.

Leaving the Navy, December 1945
[Interview 3: March 29, 1995] ##

Lage: We pretty well have you out of the navy, but we haven't found out
how you got out. You said there was a story involved with that.

Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:
Brown:

I had a chance to go with the navy to Japan in connection with what
was called the Strategic Bombing Survey. I don't think we got into
that, did we? The Strategic Bombing Survey was a big survey
project in which not simply navy people, but other military
personnel and civilians were sent to make a study of the conditions
in Japan following defeat and surrender. But I didn't want to go
to Japan under those circumstances. I really wanted to get out of
the navy- -to return to my academic work. I tried to do that, but I
was classified as "essential" and could not get released.

But having served at one post for over three years, I was
entitled to a transfer to some other post. So I put in a request
for transfer to the Washington office, feeling that I might not be
classified as "essential" there.

That sounds very clever,
out of her job?

Did your wife have any trouble getting

No, she was working in the Army Intelligence Office in Honolulu,
but the war was over and they had no reason to hold her. Moreover,
she was a civilian employee. So around September of 1945, Mary,
Charlotte, and I boarded the Lurline for our return to the
mainland. Although Charlotte and Mary had taken ships to Hawaii,
this was the first ship I had sailed on throughout the war; and I
was a naval officer. Once or twice I had gone aboard a ship that
was in the harbor to see a movie. But because I was unfamiliar
with ships and with how to act when boarding, I went only with an
Annapolis officer who could tell me what to do next, such as
saluting the officer of the quarterdeck and asking for permission
to come aboard. So the trip back to San Francisco on that famous
passenger boat was not simply pleasant, it was instructive.
Although the Lurline was nothing like a battleship or cruiser, its
crew was still made up entirely of navy officers and enlisted men.
So we heard a lot of navy lingo. Men were assigned rooms in
according to rank, and the women were assigned rooms in another
part of the boat. This was therefore not exactly a luxury cruise,
but it was the first time I had had a chance to do what a navy man
normally does: go to sea.

That is why you say you aren't really a navy man.
That's right.

84
Completing the Ph.D. Dissertation

Lage: You went on to Harvard. I think we talked about—when we discussed

Stanford we discussed-
Brown: Yes. I went to Harvard because the library was good.

Lage: But you were still enrolled as a Stanford graduate student, is that
correct?

Brown: No, not officially enrolled. I was a candidate for the Ph.D.

degree and had worked on and passed my oral examinations before I
got into the navy back in 1940. I knew what I wanted to work on
for my dissertation, but hadn't really gotten started when I got
into the navy. So, when the war was over, I really wanted to
finish that dissertation. And I knew that I couldn't do much at
Stanford because the Japanese collection there was practically
nonexistent. I felt that the best place to do this work would be
at Harvard. They had the best library then, and probably still do,
although Berkeley's now is pretty close to first place.

So when I was released from the navy in December of 1945,
Mary, Charlotte, and I moved from Washington to Cambridge so that I
could carry out research for my Ph.D. dissertation in Japanese
materials at Harvard. Since I had built up entitlement under the
G.I. Bill, I registered at Harvard for individual research under
Professor Serge Elisseeff who had advised me, back in 1938, to
return to the United States for graduate training. I think he was
a bit disgusted that I had not come to study at Harvard in 1938,
rather than return to Stanford. As I have already said, I too came
to regret that I had elected to return to Stanford, although only
Stanford had Lynn White. So I finally ended up studying under
Professor Elisseeff. It was fun to spend an hour or two with him
every week.

Lage: For questions about language or questions-
Brown: Usually about specialized economic terms that I ran across in
sixteenth- century Japanese materials.

I spent a delightful six months at Harvard. I met with
Professor Elisseeff once a week, and spent the rest of the time in
the library.

Lage: Very independent, it sounds like.

Brown: Yes, quite independent. The main thing was that I was not a

candidate for the Ph.D. at Harvard, so I had no required courses to
take.

Lage: Sort of a research fellowship?

Brown: Yes, I was a research student working on my dissertation and using
the library, where I found excellent sources.

Then the three of us returned to Stanford during the summer of
1946. I went in about June with the idea of finishing my
dissertation during the summer. None of my students, I think, have
done their research and written up a dissertation in such a short
time as that, but I did.

Lage: Does that mean it was a shorter dissertation or you were more
motivated?

Brown: Well, it was short, but it wasn't that bad. I had done quite a lot
of work. Anyway, it got me the Ph.D. degree, and it was later
published as volume I of the monograph series of the Association of
Asian Studies.

Lage: And this was on coins?

Brown: This was on money economy in medieval Japan. [Money Economy in

Medieval Japan: A Study in the Use of Coins (Monograph No. 1 of the
Far Eastern Association, 1951).]

IV THE HISTORY DEPARTMENT AT BERKELEY, 1946- 1950s, AND BROWN'S
CHAIRMANSHIP, 1957-1961

Woodbridge Bingham

Brown: But while I was at Harvard, I received a letter from Berkeley, from
my friend Woodbridge Bingham, who I had known for some years. I
think I told you that I met him in Peking.

Lage: That I can't remember. Did you tell me?

Brown: Maybe I didn't. My contacts with Woodbridge and Ursula Bingham are
long. They started in Peking. Mary and I went on a trip to Peking
shortly after we were married. That was back in about 1934. We
spent a month or so there during my spring vacation. Woodbridge
Bingham called me on the telephone one day. He had read in the
newspaper about our arrival and about our staying in a particular
missionary home.

Lage: Why would that have been in the newspaper?

Brown: There was an English newspaper in Peking, and every day it would
report on foreign visitors to Peking.

Lage: I see. A small community that--

Brown: Yes. That is, the American community. This missionary home had
been converted into a kind of inn, and this missionary woman was
taking in guests. It was a well-known place to stay. She
automatically turned over the names of her guests to this English
newspaper in Peking, which Woodbridge Bingham took and saw that I
was a visitor from Japan. He was planning on going to Japan on his
way home the following summer, and so he wanted to talk to me. He
invited us to have tea at his home .

It turned out that he was living in a beautiful Chinese
mansion. We heard it was part of the home of the previous Eripress

Dowager. I will never forget our visit there because it was the
first time I had ever been in such a grand Chinese mansion. We
arrived at the front entrance in a jinrikisha, told the guard who
we were, and were escorted through one courtyard after another
before arriving at the room where we were to have tea. It seemed
like we walked a long distance before meeting the Binghams.

Lage: Why were the Binghams in such an exalted setting?

Brown: He was there doing his research on his Ph.D. dissertation. He, and
especially his wife, had money. Her family is connected with some
big and famous furniture company, the name of which I cannot
remember. She is still alive. She and her family have plenty of
money. So even though they were graduate students, they could
afford a comfortable place in which to live.

While I was there—this gets into, I am afraid, all kinds of
stories--! met a future ambassador of China to the United States,
Hu Shih, at a meeting that Bingham invited me to attend. I met
quite a number of visiting scholars while I was there because of
Woodbridge Bingham 's contacts. This Hu Shih was one. Knight
Biggerstaff, later a professor of Chinese studies at Cornell, was
another. Knight and 1 discovered that we were distant relatives.
We even discovered that the same relative had recommended that we
look up the other, apparently not realizing that I was in Japan and
he in China.

Lage: But you still met each other.

Brown: But we still met each other in Peking.

Lage: Wow, what coincidences.

Brown: Yes, that was fun.

Lage: So, you had had this long-term connection with Bingham.

Brown: Yes. Then he came to Japan, where I saw him. Later on we were in
the navy together in Pearl Harbor. We were in the same
intelligence office but in different branches, but saw each other
off and on. I remember having lunch with him on Waikiki Beach one
day at the Halekalani Hotel, which is a very famous, old hotel
where they still have hula dances and Hawaiian music every evening.
A delightful place. As we were having lunch together under a great
banyan tree, Woodbridge said the last time he had been sitting
under that tree, he was studying Latin. He explained that his
grandfather was a missionary to Hawaii--coincidentally, James
Michener's book on Hawaii is more or less centered on the Bingham
family. So he had gone to Hawaii as a child and studied Latin

under that tree where we were having lunch together during the war.
The Bingham connections were very interesting.

Lage: Did Bingham get his interest in Asia through this missionary
connection?

Brown: Yes, it seems that Bingham missionaries were also in China. In
fact at a later dinner party at the Bingham mansion, we met a
relative who was then a medical missionary in or near Peking. But
there were other roots to his interest. His father, Senator Hiram
Bingham of Connecticut, took Woodbridge with him on a trip around
the world when Woodbridge was still in high school or college, and
they seem to have spent considerable time in China. Like many
other members of the Bingham family, Woodbridge graduated from
Yale. Then he went to Harvard where he received his M.A. degree in
Asian studies but transferred to Berkeley for work toward the Ph.D.
He was working on his dissertation for that degree when I met him
in Peking.

Lage: And then he received a teaching appointment at Berkeley.

Brown: Yes, I think he was already teaching at Berkeley when the war
began. Then he joined the navy and went to Boulder, Colorado,
where he studied Japanese intensively for one year, after which he
was promoted to the rank of lieutenant j.g. and received orders to
proceed to Pearl Harbor for work in the Joint Intelligence Center
of the Pacific Ocean Area.

Lage: So that was the Berkeley connection?

Brown: Yes, I think that Mary and I may have visited him and his wife

Ursula on our way from Hawaii to Washington in September of 1945,
after I had requested and obtained a transfer to the Washington
office of radio intelligence.

Brown's Recruitment to UC Berkeley. 1946

Brown: Anyway, I got a letter from Woodbridge Bingham asking if I would be
interested in a job at Berkeley. I wrote "Yes" immediately. So I
had this offer before I left Harvard.

Lage: You wrote back, "Yes." Why was it so easy to make the decision?
You hadn't wanted to go to Berkeley for school.

Brown: Well, even though Berkeley didn't have a good Japanese library, it
was still a distinguished university and I knew that. Later on,

the chairman of the history department at Stanford, Professor
Robinson was his name, expressed some irritation with me because I
accepted the job at Berkeley without first talking to him. I think
he was saying that they intended to offer me a job at Stanford.
But I don't regret having made the decision. If I had had a
choice, I still would have gone to Berkeley.

Lage: It wasn't the library that was attracting you, though. They didn't
have much of a library at that time.

Brown: No, but the library got better.

Lage: Yes, we'll be talking about that. So you took that job rather
quickly. Was there any interview process or--

Brown: There was a process, as there always is with appointments, but I

remember that first letter and my response to it. There were other
letters as the offer was formalized. Probably I was not formally
appointed until some time during the summer. I have forgotten the
details. I spent a mad summer at Stanford finishing my
dissertation and submitting it in time to get the degree, before
starting to teach at Berkeley in September.

Lage: So, even though it says "lecturer" here in the 1946 Berkeley

catalogue-
Brown: Well, it was understood that that appointment would change

automatically to assistant professor if and when I received the

Ph.D. degree. And I did receive the degree before I started

teaching.

Lage: But not before they printed this, most likely?
Brown: No, not then.

UC Berkeley's East Asian Languages Department

Lage: Did you have any discussions about if the University planned to put
more emphasis on Asian studies, or whether the library might be
improved?

Brown: I did know something about the history of Asian studies at
Berkeley. There had been distinguished people here at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The East Asian Language
department was already distinguished. Professor Peter Boodberg, a
very distinguished scholar in Chinese ftudies, was already here.

Lage: Where?

Brown: In the East Asian languages department.

Lage: Peter Boodberg. And they had Ferdinand Lessing.

Brown: He was also here, and I soon got acquainted with both of them.

Lage: And Florence Farquhar, associate professor of Japanese.

Brown: Yes, I remember her, but I knew Lessing and Boodberg better.

Lage: Then they had a lecturer in Siamese.

Brown: Oh, yes. Mary Haas. She was very distinguished. I had many
contacts with her. She was a delightful woman.

Lage: And Susumu Nakamura, lecturer in Japanese.

Brown: Yes, I had many associations with him down through the years. He
was a great teacher of Japanese. But, since he had not written
much and wasn't that much interested in research and writing, he
never really got a regular appointment. As I recall, he was always
a lecturer.

Lage: He has an M.A. in this listing.

Brown: Yes. But, as you know, a Ph.D. is what matters at the university
level.

Lage: Mary Haas was a lecturer here.

Brown: She was a very distinguished scholar.

Lage: Did she go on to be a professor?

Brown: She was a distinguished professor.

Lage: And Florence Farquhar had an M.A. at this point, but she was
associate professor.

Brown: I don't remember that much about her.

Lage: Maybe she didn't stay. So, the language department- -

Brown: The East Asian language department was quite distinguished. They

had Professor Kuno who had a divided appointment between East Asian
Languages and History. Then there was a professor of political

science, Professor Yanaga, who later went to Yale. So they had
done a lot in the Asian field. I was delighted to go.

Key Players in the History Department in the Late 1940s

Lage: Wonderful. Well, we have got you to Berkeley. Are you ready to
describe the history department in these early years, what it was
like, who were the key players?

Brown: Some of these people that I still know and am still close to were
here, especially Ken Stampp. He was already here when I got here,
as I recall.

Lage: We are looking at the catalogue of courses from 1946, and it tells
who was here.

Brown: Ken Stampp was already here. Probably over the years, I have had
more close associations with him than anyone else, although his
field is in American history, quite far from mine. He is a bit
younger than I am, but he was appointed earlier. He was, I think
for health reasons, not in the military service. So he was able to
go up the academic ladder a little farther during the war, whereas
I hadn't yet started.

Lage: Why the close association? Was this as a friend?

Brown: Well, socially, and politically—as far as affairs were concerned
in the history department. Professor Ernst Kantorowicz , Professor
Paul Schaeffer, and I shared the same study on the fourth floor of
the library for two or three years.

Lage: So, offices were shared? Are they still?

Brown: Not now. I think every professor has his own office. But then the
space situation was worse. It was a very nice office with a view
of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was then located near the
departmental office of the East Asian Language department.

Lage: What building did you say it was in?

Brown: In the library, fourth floor of the Main Library. The southwest

corner was where the East Asian Language department office was, and
on the other side of the elevator was the study that I shared with
Kantorowicz and Schaeffer.

92
Establishing the East Asian Library. 1947

Brown: A room nearby became the office of the East Asian Library, when it
was established. That resulted from the recommendations of a
committee made up of Boodberg, Brown, and Bingham. I haven't told
you about that story?

Lage: No.

Brown: Somehow or other, I have been talking so much about myself these
days that I forget who I have told what.

Lage: Have you been talking to other people also?

Brown: Yes, right.

Lage : That ' s dangerous .

Brown: [laughter] That committee was responsible, I think, for getting
the East Asian Library started.

Lage: How early in your career at Berkeley did that start?

Brown: Quite early. I came in '46, and it must have been '47 or '48. I
have forgotten the exact year.

Lage: What was their background? Why did the three of you come together
like that?

Brown: I think there was a general feeling that we should have a separate
library. That is, those of us working in the area and using the
library felt that it could not really get much better unless we had
books centered in one place. Cataloging and ordering, all these
functions were somewhat special for the East Asian field. All
three of us were urging that a separate library be established, and
so we were made into a committee. I think we were appointed by
President Sproul.

Lage: Did the fact that you had your office close to the East Asian
Languages department have anything to do with it?

Brown: No, my being in a study with Kantorowicz and Schaeffer was because
that room had been assigned to the history department, which then
assigned it to the three of us. Kantorowicz and Schaeffer had been
in it several years before I was permitted to occupy a desk there.
Other rooms on that floor were also assigned to the history
department, including ones for professors who were departmental
chairmen. 'Jow that I think of it, all history professors seem to

have had their studies on the fourth floor of the main library in
those years.

Lage: But still, it seems like it would make it easier that you happened
to be there.

Brown: Yes, I was close to the office of the East Asian language

department, but that was because I was a history department
professor, not because of my interest in the Japanese part of East
Asia.

Dr. Elizabeth Huff was the first librarian of the East Asian
Library.

Lage: Was she already within the system?

Brown: No, she received her Ph.D. at Harvard and, as I recall, was

appointed at Berkeley soon after receiving her degree. I remember
being a member of the selection committee for the position, and
reviewing the records of several applicants. She was obviously the
person best qualified for the position, and she did a superb job of
building up what came to be one of the best, if not the best, East
Asian library in the United States. Her office was just across the
hall from the study that I shared with Kantorowicz and Schaeffer,
and for several years that was the only office the East Asian
Library had. Dr. Huff soon acquired more books and got all those
in Asian languages placed in a separate section of the stacks,
which could be entered by a fourth-floor door near her office.

Then in "48 was the summer that I went to Japan because the
SCAP, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, invited me to go
to Japan as a consultant for higher education. Apparently,
President Sproul heard about this and asked me to come in to see
him. In his great voice, he said, "Brown, how much money can you
spend for books while you are in Japan?" My response was that I
would have to talk with Dr. Huff and her staff. I went back to say
that I could spend something like six thousand dollars. And to my
amazement, and to everybody else's amazement, he said, "I will give
you ten."

Lage: It sounded almost like he was initiating this.

Brown: Yes, he was. You cannot overlook the importance of his role in the
history of the East Asian Library.

Lage: Do you have any sense of where Sproul was coming from? Did he have
some particular interest in East Asian studies, or did someone else
have his ear?

Brown: I think he felt that the University of California should be a

leader in this important new field, and that we ought to have a
good library.

Lage: You don't know any behind-the-scenes lobbying?

Brown: No. Somebody may have gotten to him. Professor Boodberg, for
example, may have put the bug in his ear, I don't know.

But anyway, when I was in Japan during that summer, I was
pretty busy with my consulting job. 1 had a desiderata list that
the library had prepared for me, which I handed to wholesale
dealers. Since I was connected with the occupation, I was entitled
to ship these books home free. Hundreds of volumes were sent back,
but I didn't spend even half of the money that President Sproul
gave me .

Professor Denzel Carr was in the East Asian Language
department at the time. He was a distinguished linguist who knew
many Asian languages—as I recall, he taught courses in Chinese,
Japanese, Mongolian, and Indonesian. It was decided that he and
Betty McKinnon, a member of the East Asian Library staff, should go
on a book-buying trip to Japan, using the money that I was unable
to spend during the previous summer. Betty had been born in Japan
and had much of her schooling there. She was therefore good in
Japanese (her mother was Japanese and her father an American
missionary to Japan) and was appointed by Dr. Huff as a specialist
in the acquisition and cataloging of Japanese books. She and
Professor Carr purchased many more good books that year, in part
because the price of books was then quite low in Japan. That was
an important year in the history of the East Asian Library.
Following that trip, Betty McKinnon became Mrs. Carr.

Lage: Was there a focus to the purchases, historical or literary?

Brown: No, we worked from a desiderata list that had been created by

members of the East Asian Library staff. That list included major
source collections, leading academic journals, and major studies in
areas in which UC professors were offering courses on Japan:
literature, history, politics, sociology, anthropology, religion,
and art. (Later on, courses were offered too in Japanese music and
architecture.) And since that time, several great collections
(such as the Mitsui one) have been purchased, and more documentary
collections (such as series of volumes published by Shiryo Hensan
Sho of Tokyo University) as well as important studies in the
several disciplines have been added, making the East Asian Library
one of the country's strongest reference libraries in the several
humanities social science disciplines. It has become especially
strong in books published in Jap in during the last half of the

nineteenth century, in war crime materials, in academic journals,
and in documentary collections of different feudal houses and
religious institutions.

Lage: Original source material, but in a published form.

Brown: Yes, the Japanese have published a great number of such

collections, and our library seems to have most of them. Dr.
Donald Coney, who was librarian in those years, helped Dr. Huff
obtain funds for the purchase of special collections that came on
the market, such as the Mitsui collection which is an EAL gem.

After the law school was moved to its present location on
Bancroft, the East Asian Library was moved into the law school's
old building, Durant Hall. That was a great event in EAL history.
After that, the library not only had its own building but enough
space for staff offices, as well as for a well-equipped reference
room. But within a few years, the building could house only a
small portion of the Asian language holdings. Now the Chancellor
is raising something like $24 million for a new EAL library, and
plans are being drawn up.

Lage: Are you involved in any of these current things?

Brown: No, not now. The main task is getting the money. They have

received, I am told, more than half of the $24 million needed.

Lage: It is a lot more than you took off to Japan with you that summer.

Brown: That's right. EAL is rated very high, if not at the top, among

East Asian collections of the United States, and in terms of both
volume and quality. In my field of religious studies, I feel,
however, that Harvard has a better collection.

Lage: Having that kind of a library in your field, how does it affect the
development of the history department or the attraction for
graduate students or new faculty?

Brown: It makes study and research in the Japanese field very attractive.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to do distinguished research if
you don't have proper library facilities.

Lage: Is this something that, when you are recruiting faculty you
mention?

Brown: It is something that everybody knows about. We do not have to tell
them. When an offer of an appointment in the Asian field is

accepted, surely the appointee is aware of the stature of the
university and the quality of the library. It is pretty hard to
dissociate one from the other.

Lage: It is kind of a given, but I guess I am asking it now--maybe I am

getting political—but these questions are being raised now because
the library budget is cut back.

Brown: Yes. The whole problem of the library now is very complicated

because of computers. We are moving to a position, I think, when
big library holdings will all be on database.

Lage: Maybe those documents now would be on database, those basic
documents.

Brown: Yes, the basic document collections will eventually, I presume, be
copied on databases that can be put on computers and be accessed by
any student or scholar, like me out here in Walnut Creek. I now
gain access to UC catalogues without leaving my study. Eventually,
I presume we will have access not simply to the catalogues of
libraries throughout the state of California but to those of Japan
as well. Moves are now being made in that direction.

Lage: The catalogue. Not the books themselves, but the notice that they
are there.

Brown: Yes, not yet the contents of books, just their titles. We still
have to check out the books.

Lage: But maybe that is changing also.

Brown: Yes, just a few days ago I had a long conversation with Shigeru
Handa of the old Tenjin Shrine in Nagoya, a man who had just
completed a CD-ROM database on Japanese culture. He is working
with Professor Lewis Lancaster of the East Asian Languages
department in expanding the database to include such ancient
Japanese classics as the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki written early
in the eighth century A.D. He says that he has already finished
about 80 percent of the former, sometimes referred to as the bible
of Shinto. When both the Japanese original and the English
translation of that source are put on CD-ROM, a researcher will be
able to find, within seconds, any single reference (in both
languages) to a particular word, name, institution, ritual, phrase,
et cetera, that may appear in that source. And he or she will be
able to do so while sitting before the computer at home, anywhere
in the United States.

Research is being revolutionized, really, by this sort of
thing. And I think the revolution is just getting start ad.

Lage: You are right.

Brown: That affects the whole library situation.

Lage: And the choices of what to build up, what to concentrate on. But

is that document of importance to you—the actual artifact—is that
something that you as a scholar are interested in?

Brown: There are people who want to study the original documents, to see
even the texture of the writing. That is a specialized field.
Those people, of course, must see the actual, original document.
But for an historian, and most people using these sources, the main
thing is the contents: what is said and written in a document. You
can get the contents just as well from a copy as you can from
seeing the original. For most research and study purposes, I think
the copy, especially if you have a computer and the copy on
database and can be accessed by computer, may be more useful than
the original.

Lage: The ability to search the document.

Higher Education Consulting in Japan, 1948

Lage: You mentioned earlier the 1948 consultation in Japan that you did
for the SCAP, you called it. Shall we talk about that?

Brown: Okay. A lot of things happened during that summer.
Lage: What exactly were you hired to do?

Brown: I was invited to go to Tokyo as a consultant in higher education.
I think the reason that I was invited was that a friend of mine
from Stanford, Donald Nugent, initiated the invitation. Donald
Nugent 's story is long and complicated, but I became associated
with him even before World War II when I was in Japan and he was a
graduate student at Stanford studying under Professor Ichihashi.
He wanted to come to Japan, as I had done, to teach English. So I
had something to do with finding a job for him in Wakayama. He
taught there for at least three years. We used to go down to visit
him, and he and his wife came up to Kanazawa to visit us.

Then during the war, Nugent became a marine officer and served
in Guadalcanal and various other places . I think he was given a
commission in the marine corps because he had studied some
Japanese, although I'm not sure just how much. After the war,
instead of getting out of the service as I did, he stayed on. He

became a high official in SCAP (the Supreme Commander of the Allied
Powers, who was General MacArthur)--SCAP was divided up like a
government into various divisions and departments. There was an
education division and Nugent was its head, a big job. He was like
a cabinet member on General MacArthur's staff. The education
division under him was huge.

Lage: It was responsible for all the education in Japan? Was that the
idea?

Brown: Responsible for it is not quite the right way. They supervised it
and made demands .

Lage: Were they looking into the value content in the--

Brown: They were into the business of reforming and democratizing Japanese
education at all levels. The entire educational system was
changed. In the place of the old 6-5-3-3 system — six years for
elementary school, five years for middle school, three years for
higher school, and three years for university- -the Japanese were
forced to adopt the American-like 6-3-3-4 system. This meant that
the elementary schools were not changed, and that the old middle
school was shortened to three years and made into something like a
junior high school. But the old higher schools became lower
divisions (the freshmen and sophomore years) of a four-year
university. Consequently the old First Higher School in Tokyo
became the lower division of Tokyo University—both located in
different parts of the city. And my Fourth Higher School in
Kanazawa became the lower division of a new Kanazawa university
that was made up of some old and new colleges of that city. These
changes meant that new schools had to be built all over the country
as new high schools. And this was done although many Japanese
complained that this was far too costly and unjustified.

Lage: Were they giving more access to higher education, greater numbers
who could go to high school?

Brown: Yes, many more students attended all these new high schools and new
universities. Almost all young people could and did go through
high school, and a very large percent of them went on to
university. I have not seen recent statistics but my impression is
that the percentage of high school graduates attending and
graduating from universities is now about as high as in the United
States.

But the "reforms" went well beyond organizational change.
Drastic alterations were made in courses and textbooks,
particularly for schools above the junior high school level.
Courses in ethics, which had been used for making students into

obedient and loyal servants of the state, were either eliminated or
drastically revised. But much attention was also given to
instruction in Japanese history.

I was invited by SCAP (General MacArthur) to come to Japan in
the summer of 1948 as a consultant in higher education. Although I
received no definite instructions as to what I should do, I came to
feel that I was expected to study and make recommendations for
change, at the university level, that would make these institutions
into more effective instruments for developing an individual's
potential, and for instilling in students a deeper understanding of
the ideals of political democracy, social justice, and human
rights.

My study and thoughts were centered on the koza (professorial
chair) system which was, and still is, at the core of an
established university organization. The funds for each chair,
approved by the Department of Education, included not only the
salary of the chair holder but the salaries of all associate
professors, researchers, assistants, and clerks employed by him.
The chair holder usually had his own library and his own nest of
offices for professorial and clerical employees. He was therefore
something like an American departmental chairman who occupies his
office until retirement, who exercises almost absolute control over
who is appointed and promoted within the department, and who
decides what the department's graduate students should study, what
research money they receive and what appointments will be
recommended for them.

Lage: Did you come up with a report or make a series of recommendations?

Brown: Oh yes. I wrote a report but kept no copy for myself. In addition
to having my say about the koza system, I recommended--and others
probably made the same recommendation—that a commission of
American scholars be sent to Japan for a summer. Such a commission
was sent a year or two later. A number of distinguished scholars
made more specific recommendations for change, many of which were
probably adopted. But apparently no basic change was made in the
koza system.

Lage: Oh, it still prevails?

Brown: Yes, in the old national universities. I am not so sure that it
was right to recommend a change, but I did.

Lage: In general, were the people that you were dealing with, working
with, the Americans, sensitive to Japanese culture? Or was this
really an outside group coming in and wanting to make wholesale
changes?

100

Brown: These people were very serious students of Japanese education. On
the whole they did a decent job and made good recommendations. But
not many had an in-depth knowledge of the age-old interaction
between education and social change.

We were, after all, representatives of a victorious power.
The Japanese with whom we talked must have thought we were
excessively sure of ourselves, if not downright bossy. Many surely
felt that we were pressing for change that really made very little
sense in the Japanese situation and that our views and
recommendations were shaped by a common assumption that only
American educational methods were democratically correct.

Our position must have seemed quite unreasonable, if not
objectionable. But the odd thing is that most educational reforms
have stuck. Even after SCAP control was removed and Japan became
an independent state in 1952, most of the educational reforms were
preserved. Although organizational changes had been criticized in
early years of the occupation, most of them are still intact,
including the American 6-3-3-4 system.

Lage: You certainly were in a different role. When you first came to

Japan, you were the sort of wet-behind-the-ears, and the Japanese
were showing you the way. Then you came back as a representative
of the victor. Was that something that was difficult for you?

Brown: It was embarrassing in a way. I was still in my thirties at the
time, going to meetings with distinguished scholars in various
fields of education.

Lage: You were probably very much in tune with the practice of showing
the respect that you knew was expected.

Brown: Well, I wasn't that much in tune, I am afraid.
Lage: But I mean in the thirties you certainly were--

Brown: It was quite different. Here I was, a decade or so later, sitting
in meetings with distinguished Japanese scholars and
administrators, and I got the feeling they were waiting to hear
what I was going to say. It was unpleasant to be in a position in
which they were treating me with such deference. It was because I
was a representative of a victorious power, a relationship that was
strange and unbelievable and a little bit embarrassing. I really
didn't quite like it.

Later on, when I went back to Japan, after the country gained
independence and people were more sure of themselves, conversations

101

with scholars were quite different. The situation had returned to
normal and relationships were much better.

Lage : So this one period was kind of an awkward interim?
Brown: Yes, it was awkward, to say the least.
Lage: I would think so.

I want to get us back to the [Berkeley] history department, or
do you have something else you want to say?

Brown: I would like to talk about an incident that occurred shortly after
my return to Berkeley. That arose when a young man from the
university's public relations office came to interview me about my
trip to Japan. He asked good questions and then wrote up a
statement for release to the press, which I read and approved.

A few days later a short article appeared in the Oakland
Tribune that was apparently based on that release. I do not recall
seeing it, but it must have been a rewrite that was badly
distorted. Anyway, that seems to have been picked up and again
rewritten by a correspondent of a national news service. I think
it was the Associated Press. That reached Japan and appeared on
the front page of every major newspaper in the country.

In order to understand why this was a headline story in Japan
but not in California, one should bear in mind that Japanese
newspapers were then operating under strict regulations not to
print anything the least bit critical of SCAP or the Allied
occupation. But no regulation forbade the printing of stories
appearing in an American press release. So this Associated Press
story about my visit to Japan, after being rewritten and distorted,
included a statement that read something like this: "Professor
Delmer Brown of the University of California says that the
occupation policy in Japan is leading more to the spread of
communism than to the spread of democracy."

Within a few hours that story appeared in newspapers all over
Japan, and I received from Tokyo the longest telegram I have ever
seen. It included a full English version of what had hit the front
page of Japan's leading newspapers, and asked whether I had
actually said such things and that, if not, I demand a retraction.
It was signed by my old friend Colonel Donald Nugent, head of
SCAP's Department of Education.

Lage: Where do you think they got that?

102

Brown: They dreamed it up. I didn't say it. Nothing like that was in the
release from the University of California. It was irresponsible

journalism.

Immediately after receiving that long telegram, I went to the
public relations office to ask advice, pointing out that I had been
quoted as making a statement on a subject that had not been
mentioned in the interview. The head of the office readily
understood why General MacArthur, Colonel Nugent, and I were upset,
but he pointed out that although we might well get the Associated
Press to print a correction, that correction probably would appear
only at the bottom of some page in a few newspapers , and not be
read. So he recommended that I do nothing.

While the professor that I talked to at the public relations
office undoubtedly understood the press situation in America,
neither he nor I clearly understood why General MacArthur was so
irate, or why the Japanese press had been so quick to pick up a
critical remark that had not been made. We did not fully
appreciate how uneasy the general was about instituting some truly
radical reforms in Japan: big landowners were being forced to sell
land to the farmers who cultivated it, big business executives were
being forced to negotiate with labor unions, and the central
government was being forced to limit its control over schools, the
police, and the press. Such moves were leading conservatives in
both Japan and the United States to say that MacArthur was being
too liberal and too democratic, if not downright socialistic.

So when the release about my trip to Japan came out, a writer
for the conservative Oakland Tribune apparently thought he saw
something that he wanted to hear, and wrote up a story further
revised by the Associated Press for release to Japanese newspapers
that were only too happy to use it for pleasing their conservative
readers . These readers were undoubtedly influenced by the
complaints of rich and powerful landowners, huge corporation
executives, and high-ranking government bureaucrats who were being
undercut by General MacArthur 's reforms.

Moreover, neither the P.R. professor nor I understood that,
under pressure from General MacArthur and his staff, the Japanese
press probably would have given proper attention to a retraction.
So I regret that I did not submit to Associated Press officials a
copy of the UC release, along with the AP version of it, and ask if
they could see any similarity between the two. In particular, I
should have objected strongly to being quoted, by name and within
quotation marks, on a subject that had not been brought up in the
interview. But I didn't, which I regret.

103

This experience destroyed my friendship with Colonel Nugent,
made it quite unlikely that I would be permitted to return to Japan
as long as that country was being occupied by the Allied Powers
(headed by General MacArthur), and increased my skepticism about
the veracity of anything I read in any newspaper.

Lage: Even then. Now everybody is skeptical.

Structure of UC Berkeley's History Department

Lage: When you were talking about the koza in Japan, did you have k5za in
the history department at Cal?

Brown: Oh no. [laughter]

Lage: Were there any correspondences?

Brown: Well, there was a bit of the koza-like authoritarianism in the

history department when I arrived there in 1946. And possibly that
was what made me alert to the way that the k5za system had
complicated, even blocked, the spread of egalitarianism and
democracy in Japanese universities.

Lage: Right. That's what I want you to talk about.

Brown: Until shortly before my arrival in Berkeley, the chairmanship of
the history department (like other departments in the university)
had been held by one professor until his retirement. In our case
that was Professor Herbert Bolton. During the many years he was
chairman, appointments and promotions were pretty much under his
control. The history department became a kind of Bolton show.
Then, and to some extent until the "Bouwsma revolution of 1958,"
the department was made up of professors who had studied under, or
been appointed and promoted by, Professor Bolton.

Lage: He had a very different view of history, American history.

Brown: Right! He thought the history of the United States should be

taught and studied within the context of North and South American
history. Consequently, introductory courses for lower division
students included one on the History of the Americas. And other
courses and programs reflected this "American" view of history.

When I arrived, Professor Bolton had retired. Professor
Frederic Paxson was chairman; and he was followed in a few years by
Professor John Hicks. Although both had been appointed d .ri-ig the

104

Bolton era, they were not lifetime chairmen and they were not
committed to the "American" approach to U.S. history. So by the
time of my arrival, the practice of holding a departmental
chairmanship for life had been abandoned, and three new professors
of U.S. history had been appointed who did not subscribe to the
"American" approach: Kenneth Stampp (Wisconsin), Henry May
(Harvard), and Carl Bridenbaugh (Harvard). We commonly think of
those pre-1958 years as a time when the department was ingrown and
Boltonian. But this generalization clouds the fact that those
three professors had been appointed before 1958, as were three
other "young Turks" of that year: Professor George Guttridge
(Cambridge), Professor Paul Schaeffer (Pennsylvania), and myself
(Stanford). Moreover, the distinguished Professor Kantorowicz had
been in the department before he left for Princeton over the
loyalty oath. And three assistant professors, who later gained
distinction for writing books outside the realm of "American"
history, had already been invited to Berkeley: Joseph Levenson
(Harvard), Robert Brentano (Oxford), and Gene Brucker (Princeton).
And we should not forget that many of the above appointments were
made while Professor Frederic Paxson (Wisconsin, I think) and
Professor John Hicks (Wisconsin) were departmental chairmen, both
of whom had come to Berkeley during the Bolton years.

Lage: Right. And Hicks was brought in by Paxson, I think.

Brown: Or earlier. Professor Hicks came before World War II. [1942-1957]
So the department was by no means limited to students of Professor
Bolton or committed to the "American" view of U.S. history.

Departmental Rivalries, Strong Personalities

Lage: Some have described a system in the department where certain
figures had their little coterie of--

Brown: That is another thing that I ran into when I first arrived here in
1946: a bitter rivalry between Professor Kerner and Professor Palm
that led to a crisis when, as I recall, six students taking the
Ph.D. written examination in European history were all failed:
three working under Palm were flunked by Kerner, and three Kerner
students were flunked by Palm. Each of the two senior professors
held something like a koza position within the department, and
there was a good deal of rivalry between them.

Lage: Between Kerner and Palm?

105

Brown: Yes. I remember the history department meeting at which this

problem was taken up. Professor Hicks was chairman. The situation
was tense. A vote in favor of passing any of the six would have
been a slap in the face for either Professor Palm or Professor
Kerner; and it did not seem right to approve a flunk of all six
when all were passed by their guiding professors.

Lage: What did Palm and Kerner have to say for themselves?

Brown: Each insisted that he was justified in flunking the three who had
not studied under him, and that his own students should be passed.

It was I- -believe it or not- -who proposed that a special
committee should be appointed to review the entire record of all
six students—not just their examinations --and to come back to the
department with a recommendation as to which of the six students
should be failed and which should be passed. Although I was then
only a lowly assistant professor and must have come off as pretty
brash, I was not a follower of either Palm or Kerner; and my field
of teaching and research was on the other side of the globe from
Europe. So I could and did make the proposal from a position of
neutrality. And it was the only proposal made. [laughter] So a
committee was set up, and I was made chairman, although I was only
an assistant professor.

Lage: In a completely different field.

Brown: That may have been the principal reason for making me chairman, for
my teaching and research were not in the European field. Guttridge
and Schaeffer, as I recall, were also appointed to the committee.
We worked hard on those cases and--

Lage: Did you look at papers they had written?
Brown: We looked at the entire record of each.
Lage: But you didn't do the oral exam over?

Brown: Oh, no. We didn't subject the students to another written exam,
but we did read other papers, such as their seminar papers. Then
we came back to the department with a recommendation that certain
individuals be passed and others failed. The department accepted
our recommendations. And it was then, as I recall, that a decision
was made that the training of graduate students should henceforth
not be limited to work under a single professor. That,
incidentally, was common practice under Japan's koza system. And
it was after the Kerner-Palm incident that the department began
requiring that every graduate student work in more than one field
and under more than one professor of history.

106

Lage: Do you remember how many of these six students ended up passing?

Brown: I think most of them passed, but one or two failed. I can't
remember the details.

Lage: Had the same thing happened with faculty hiring, that these
professors had a lot of power in that area?

Brown: Yes. I have ambivalent feelings about the situation in the

department then. I didn't like its koza-like authoritarianism but
could not but appreciate the freedom to teach and study Japanese
history in any way I wished. I also liked being given
responsibilities, such as chairing the committee set up to
recommend which of the Kerner-Palm students should be passed, even
though I had not yet received tenure. Shortly after the Kerner-
Palm incident, by the way, my friend and golf partner Walt Bean
said that he had never heard of such a young assistant professor
functioning as an elder statesman. [laughter]

Lage: That is quite a compliment.

Brown: Yes. I remember it; I must have liked it.

Lage: What do you think accounted for your ability to--I guess you had an
ability to bring people together.

Brown: It was mostly, you know, studying and making our recommendations on
the basis of objective evidence. I think it was a kind of proper
historical approach. But I did get such jobs quite early. One was
my appointment as chairman of the T.A. room assignment committee.
I do not think that there were any other members of the committee,
so maybe I was simply given that assignment because, as I remember
John saying, Miss Steele of the registrar's office, who was in
charge of assigning rooms for all courses, was getting sick of
hearing history T.A.s complain so much about receiving terrible
rooms for use at the worst times of the day. So Miss Steele was
quite willing to hand to the history department the task of
assigning rooms to our T.A.s. Having received a block of over two
or three hundred rooms, I first worked with some T.A.s in
classifying each room and hour as either desirable, acceptable, or
undesirable. Then the T.A.s readily agreed to take an equitable
share of each. The last I heard, T.A. classroom assignments were
still being handled in this way, but by the T.A.s themselves
without any professorial supervision or control.

Lage: This is the quality of the room?

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Brown: Yes, of the assignment, not only of the room, but especially the
time.

Lage: Oh, yes, that's right. Time is--

Brown: Nobody wanted to teach at eight in the morning or five in the
afternoon. Various things made a room assignment undesirable:
either it was too large, too small, too dingy, or too far away; or
the hour was too early, during the noon hour, or late in the
afternoon. We rated each room and hour, and then we saw to it that
every T.A. got an equal share of good and bad assignments.

Lage: Good. That sounds very complicated.

How did you get into the teaching business at this point? Did
you have to teach these large lectures too?

Brown: Oh no. I was hired to teach Japanese history. I taught two
lecture courses and a seminar in Japanese history.

Lage: And there wasn't a big lecture course?

Brown: No. In those early years there was not that much interest in
Japan. Many students felt that the Japanese problem had been
solved: we had defeated them in war and there was no need to think
about them any more. [laughter] Enrollment in my classes varied,
but usually it was between fifty and one hundred, sometimes more.
I also taught a graduate seminar. The normal teaching load then
was two undergraduate lecture courses and a graduate seminar per
semester. Later, there was a shift to one undergraduate lecture
course and one graduate course.

Lage: Was that decision made at a certain point, to reduce the teaching
load?

Brown: That was later on.

Lage: Okay. We will put that down for later, because we are trying to
get a picture of what it was like then.

Appointments to the Department

Brown: Even in those early years, much of our attention was given to new
appointments and, to my surprise and delight, even assistant
professors became involved in the selection process, especially if
the new appointment was to be in the assistant professor's general

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Lage:
Brown:

field of teaching and research. For example, I was on the
selection committee for a new appointment in modern Chinese
history. Maybe I was chairman, for I remember having the
responsibility of interviewing John Fairbanks of Harvard about his
two most promising students: Benjamin Schwartz who had already done
some excellent work in Chinese communist thought; and Joseph
Levenson who was making a name for himself in nineteenth century
intellectual history.

Even as an assistant-
Even as an assistant professor. I remember comparing the two
candidates in discussions with fellow members of the selection
committee. It was assumed that we could have either of the two.
We chose Levenson. Schwartz later received an appointment at
Harvard.

Lage: Was he too at Harvard?

Brown: They both had received, or were receiving, their Ph.D.s from

Harvard. We looked at other candidates but these were the two most
promising scholars. Joe soon produced outstanding publications
and, during my first term as departmental chairman, he received
accelerated merit increases that made him so delighted to be at
Berkeley that he turned down offers from other universities before
mentioning them to me. That is, he did not use these offers to
pressure us for another accelerated merit increase. As you know,
he and his son were thrown from a boat on the Russian River and Joe
was drowned trying to save his son. That was a great blow and loss
to us all.

Lage: What about Bingham?

Brown: Bingham was already here.

Lage: He was not that much older than you, it seems.

Brown: He was a few years older.

Lage: Was there anybody in the Asian studies area that exercised the kind
of power that, let's say, Kerner and Palm did in European history?

Brown: Yes, Professor Kerner seemed to feel that he was chief of the Asian
area as well. He had worked with Professor Kuno in producing a
translation of a medieval source on Japanese-Chinese relations.
That and his studies of Russia's eastern movement gave him a
special interest in Asia and made him feel that he should have a
say about such matters as new appointments in that area.

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Lage: Was he fluent in Japanese?

Brown: Kerner? No, he didn't teach anything about Japan. European
history was his field.

Lage: He just sort of reached over and took in the others?

Brown: Yes. I recall someone saying that Professor Kerner, strongly

anticommunist, would undoubtedly oppose an appointment for Schwartz
who was specializing in Chinese communist thought. But since we
considered Levenson a deeper and more creative scholar, we selected
him and faced no opposition from Kerner. Although Schwartz too
became distinguished for his books in modern Chinese thought,
members of the selection committee continued to be certain that we
had made the right choice.

Lage: Did Kerner have kind of a political take on teaching Russian, is
this what you are saying?

Brown: He was simply anticommunist. I think his position was so strong
and well known that it was assumed any scholar who had a special
interest in communist thought would be, to him, objectionable.

Lage: That is interesting.

Brown: His influence was very strong in the Far Eastern field. He was
irritated with me whenever I didn't do things the way he wanted
them done .

Lage: As a person, was he difficult to deal with?

Brown: Well, he was difficult in the sense that most any authoritarian
figure is difficult. His way was always right and you really
couldn't discuss anything with him. I got along with him, but I
must have resented the authority he was trying to exert.

Lage: Did either of these men, Kerner and Palm, aspire to be chairman of
the department?

Brown: I don't know, they probably did. But in those years the

appointment of departmental chairmen was in the hands of President
Sproul, and he probably was not too keen on either Palm or Kerner
because of the bitter rivalry between them.

Lage: The president appointed the chair?

Brown: Yes, the president undoubtedly consulted a few members of the

department when appointing a new chairman, but my impression was
that he listened mainly to Professor John Hicks who carried a lot

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of weight on campus . Hicks was not only named departmental
chairman shortly after my arrival but was graduate dean. As far as
I know, the practice of asking each member of the department to
indicate his or her preferences, when selecting a new chairman, had
not yet been established. That came later.

Lage: Are there other old-timers in the department that you want to talk
about? Not everybody is going to remember these, you know.

Brown: I remember them all.
Lage: What about Raymond Sontag?

Brown: [laughs] He was another powerful figure in the department at the

time of my arrival in 1946. As a distinguished teacher and scholar
in German diplomatic history, he was a man of considerable
influence. In a sense he had his own k5za.

The Revolution of the "Young Turks'

Lage: Now, how about the "young Turks"?

Brown: Last spring Professor Gene Brucker, who was this year's Faculty
Lecturer, delivered his lecture on the history of the history
department. His speech was focused on the department's remarkable
growth after the so-called "revolution" of the 1950s. At a later
meeting of history professors, talks and comments were made about
Gene's presentation. Most of what was said that afternoon seemed
rooted in an assumption that a small group of "young Turks" had
stirred up the "revolution," and that these same professors were
largely responsible for the subsequent spate of good appointments.

Lage: We are still in the early fifties?

Brown: In 1956, to be exact. That was when six relatively young members
of the department (George Guttridge, Paul Schaeffer, Carl
Bridenbaugh, Kenneth Stampp, Henry May, and Delmer Brown)
recommended the appointment of Professor William Bouwsma, whereas
the majority of the department did not.

Lage: Was this appointment in European history?

Brown: Yes. But only two of the young Turks (George and Paul) taught

courses in European history. The other four were far afield: three
(Carl, Ken, and Henry) were in American history, and yours truly in
Japanese history. So in addition to being relatively young--! was

Ill

forty-six at the time and Ken and Henry were younger--the young
Turks were not specialists in European history.

Lage: And yet the recommendation of the six young Turks was accepted and
the department's majority recommendation was rejected. Did that
surprise you?

Brown: It certainly did. We were not surprised that a faculty

recommendation led to a faculty appointment but that a departmental
recommendation (backed by an overwhelming majority that included
our most senior scholars) was rejected and another recommendation
(backed only by six junior professors) was approved.

All of us were familiar with, and proud of, the Berkeley
tradition established back in 1923 when President Wheeler agreed
that no faculty appointment would be made until he had received and
considered a recommendation from the Academic Senate's Budget
Committee.

In subsequent years the Budget Committee came to make its
recommendations on the basis of a two-tiered review process. First
came a departmental review- recommendation of three distinct stages:

(1) a departmental selection committee's recommendation in terms of
the candidate's capabilities in teaching, research, and university-
public service; (2) a review of the selection committee's
recommendation by the tenured members of the department; and (3) a
departmental recommendation submitted by the chairman. Second came
a Budget Committee review- recommendation of two stages: (1) a
review by a special committee (made up of one person from the
department and two from related fields outside the department); and

(2) a final recommendation of the Budget Committee, which is then
submitted to the chancellor for a decision. In my three years on
the Budget Committee, no single Budget Committee recommendation of
a faculty appointment was ever rejected, although in a few cases
the chancellor made the recommended appointments or promotions at a
higher salary level.

Lage: And that was the situation in 1956?

Brown: Yes, except that the practice of appointing departmental chairmen
for a period of no longer than five years, initiated after World
War II, reduced the power of the chairman to dominate the selection
and review process within his department. Therefore by 1956 a
chairman of the history department could not exert the kind of
influence over departmental recommendations that had been exerted
in earlier years by Professor Bolton.

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Lage: Now how do you explain how the recommendations of a minority of six
could prevail over a departmental recommendation supported by a
majority of its professors, including the most senior ones?

Brown: Our separate letters recommending the appointment of Professor
William Bouwsma were apparently sent to the Budget Committee by
Dean [Lincoln] Constance. I say "apparently" because the details
of what the Budget Committee does and recommends are highly
confidential. I was on that committee between 1964 and 1967 and I
discovered then that what the Budget Committee does is not known by
anyone but the chancellor and the committee staff. We had a
separate cluster of offices to which only committee members and the
staff had keys; the names of professors selected by the committee
to serve on special review committees were not disclosed; and
conclusions reached either by the Budget Committee or its special
review committee were seen only by the chancellor. So I can only
deduce that the young-Turk letters were handed over to the Budget
Committee and that these were seen and studied before a
recommendation was sent to the chancellor for his decision.
Although the names of persons serving on the Budget Committee at
the time were surely reported to the Academic Senate, we can only
assume that their recommendations became the basis of the
chancellor's official rejection of the history department's
majority recommendation. No one has definitely said so. After
serving on the Budget Committee (about a decade later), I concluded
that the dean and the chancellor had probably been able to reject
the department's recommendation only because that was the position
taken by the Budget Committee.

Lage : How do you characterize young Turk influence on the history

department at the time of 1956 "revolution" and in later years?

Brown: As I think back over the comments that have been made by my

colleagues on this subject, I feel that I have heard at least three
rather different views of what the young Turks were up to. One is
that they were led by Harvard men trying to "strengthen" the
department by adding as many Harvard men as possible to the staff.
The second is that they were a small group of young professors from
other universities who were rebelling against the control of Bolton
students and Bolton appointees. And the third one is that they
were young professors making a serious attempt to add interesting
and creative historians to the department.

Each of these views is rooted in a measure of truth about who
the young Turks were and what they were doing. But differences
depended, it seems to me, on who is talking. The Harvard view, for
example, is probably aired most by members of the defeated
majority; the Bolton view on the other hand is most commonly
expressed by colleagues who came to the department after the

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"revolution" or who were recommended by one or more young Turks;
and I think the third "hard- look" view would be preferred by the
young Turks themselves.

Lage: Was there any substance to the Harvard view?

Brown: Yes, quite a bit. Although only Carl and Henry received their

Ph.D. degrees from Harvard, the rest of us certainly held Harvard,
and Harvard historians, in high esteem. As was noted in an earlier
interview, I was at Harvard working on my Ph.D. dissertation
(submitted at Stanford) when I was first approached for an
appointment at Berkeley, and the man who first approached me was
Woodbridge Bingham, also from Harvard. You will remember too that,
as a member of the search committee for an appointment in modern
Chinese history, I talked first with John Fairbanks (a Harvard
professor) about two of his most promising students: Joseph
Levenson and Benjamin Schwartz. Also I have often expressed the
view that any graduate student is sure to gain prestige and self-
confidence from the possession of a Ph.D. from Harvard, even if and
when Harvard has no specialist in that student's chosen area of
research. But most young Turks were not Harvard men, and most of
our new appointments were offered to men and women who had received
their training elsewhere.

Lage: And was there any substance to the Bolton view?

Brown: Yes. Although Professor Bolton 's term as chairman had ended
several years before 1956, as I have already noted, a Bolton
student (James King) was departmental chairman when the blow-up
came. And most of our tenured professors had joined the department
in Bolton years, before and during the World War II. Since most
Bolton students with professorships in the history department had
not achieved much distinction, and seemed prone to favor mediocre
appointments, it was logical to deduce that the young Turks were
rebelling against the Bolton gang.

But that view, in my opinion, is only the negative side of who
we were and what we were trying to do: it emphasizes what we were
against rather than what we were for. I don't think any of us
disliked Jim. He was a most personable man and administered
departmental affairs in a gentle and even-handed way. He had
suffered from the death, by cancer, of his young and lovely wife;
and we had no desire to increase his misery by having him ousted
from the chairmanship. We were not driven to oppose the majority
recommendation by feelings of antipathy toward anyone, including
Professor Bolton himself who, after all, had been elected president
of the American Historical Association. Instead, I submit that we
were motivated, first and foremost, by a desire to make the history
department one of the world's most distinguished history departments,

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Lage: If you were not rebelling against anyone, how would you
characterize what was done?

Brown: The action which led to the so-called "rebellion" of the young

Turks was the writing of our six letters, and the reading, talking,
and thinking that made the letters convincing. We did not read
what each other had written, but the discussions we had together
beforehand, plus the memory of what I personally wrote, makes me
quite sure that every sentence was focused on the position that
Bill Bouwsma--not the person recommended by the majority- -should be
appointed. I did not write, and I do not think anyone else wrote,
anything about the wrong-headedness or evil intentions of our
opponents.

After the "rebellion" was over, and George was appointed
chairman and I his vice chairman, two members of majority did give
us a bit of trouble, but neither of the two was thought of as a
hated leader of the opposition. One was Engel Sluiter, who was
really teed off by what had happened to his good friend Jim King,
and who seems to have felt that we six self-serving Harvard types
had done the damage. Even though I did what I could when I was
chairman to obtain additional research grants for Engel (grants
that seem never to have led to a single publication) , our old
poker-playing friendship was never re-established. But Engel 's
rather sullen behavior posed no serious problems, for his
opposition never took the form of a carefully considered plan or
recommendation.

Ray Sontag's opposition, however, was different. Because he
was such a respected member of the faculty, and such a smooth and
convincing talker, we could not but assume that any departmental
proposal we wanted might well be scuttled by a review committee on
which Ray sat. So his assumed opposition forced us to be
particularly careful in preparing cases for faculty promotions and
appointments.

But later on, when I was chairman, and moved to recommend that
George Guttridge be awarded one of the endowed chairs , I felt I had
to do more than prepare a good case, because Ray's position on
George's scholarship was well known. So I took the unusual, and
probably improper, step of asking the dean to do what he could to
prevent the Budget Committee from appointing Ray to its review
committee. The dean made no promises but since our recommendation
was approved, I could not but conclude that Ray had not been made a
member of the review committee. I also had to be careful about
including Ray on departmental search committees, making quite sure
that if he was appointed, some other equally hard-working and
outspoken person (like Carl Bridenbaugh) was also included. We

115

began to say and think that every committee should have at least
one "watch dog" member.

Although I could not but think of Ray as the person most
likely to keep us from doing what we felt should be done, I am
inclined to think that his opposition was constructive: he forced
us to make sure that we did our homework.

Because Ray, more than anyone else, stood out as the opponent
of our "rebellion", the most pleasing and gratifying compliment I
ever received came from him. This occurred at an informal
retirement party held at the Durant Hotel. Toward the end of the
party, Ray came to where I was standing and said, "Delmer, our
department is now what a department should be." I could hardly
believe what I was hearing. And since nobody else seems to have
heard him say that, I feel impelled to slip his comment into my
oral history.

Therefore I insist that the most significant action taken by
the young Turks was not opposition to Boltonian enemies but
department-building, which required hard work (reading, discussing,
and writing), not Bolton-bashing.

Lage: Did this hard-work attention to department-building last?

Brown: Although we may not have been aware that we were working any harder
than anybody else, and although others probably did not or would
not characterize our activity in any such a way, I know that after
that (and hopefully right down to the present day) search committee
reports came to be based on discriminating and comparative
evaluations grounded in extensive reading and research, that tenure
meetings became long affairs at which the teaching and research
records of leading candidates were rigorously examined and debated,
and that departmental recommendations were well-documented
presentations that must have caused Dean Constance to say, some
years later, that everything a historian writes is bound to be
long.

I dare to say that hard work on appointments and promotions
lasted because of what I saw and read during my two terms as
departmental chairman (from 1967 to 1961 and again from 1971 to
1975). And what I saw and read as a member of the Budget Committee
(1964 to 1967) suggests that the history department's tradition of
hard work on appointments and promotions was spreading. Shortly
after I became a member of the Budget Committee, I was told (and I
could readily see) that history department recommendations were
marked not only by their length but by the results of
discriminating and comparative study. By the end of my three years
on the Budget Committee, it was clear that the recommen lat ions of

116

other departments were getting much better, suggesting that the
hard-work tradition was gaining strength in other parts of the
university.

Carl Bridenbaugh's Role, and his Departure from Berkeley

Lage: Did any one of the six young Turks have more to do with the
establishment of this tradition than anyone else?

Brown: I don't know what others would say (three of the six are now dead)
but my guess is that all would agree that Carl Bridenbaugh did more
hard work than anyone else. In most every case, even outside the
sphere of American colonial history, he usually made more telephone
calls, wrote more letters, and did more reading than anyone else.
Of course we always heard about the work he had done --probably what
was done by more reticent individuals (such as Paul and George) was
not properly appreciated. But before any selection or tenure
committee meeting, every individual was apt to spend many hours on
preparation if he or she knew that Carl would be present. He or
she apparently assumed that Carl would already have read most
everything the major candidates had written, and had reached a
decision on whether any one had achieved true distinction. So I do
not object to Carl's being referred to as the "chief Turk",
although none of us would admit that we ever did or said anything
because that was what Carl wanted.

In connection with his hard work on personnel matters, I feel
impelled to state that Carl was also a stickler for high academic
standards. He was particularly outspoken about the difference
between a popular teacher and a good teacher, as well as between an
interesting book and one that leads us to think more clearly and
deeply about change in the life of human beings at a critical time
in history. In attempting to identify and measure the scholarly
achievement of a candidate considered for appointment or promotion,
Professor Emilio Segre (a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry who
served on the Budget Committee with me) frequently raised this
sharp question: "What does he make?" In a similar situation, Carl
would characteristically ask: "What has he done?" Both were
seeking evidence of originality and creativity.

I can't resist throwing in a story or two about Carl's
insistence on, and preoccupation with, high standards. One summer
we gave a dinner party for historians from other universities who
had been invited to teach in Berkeley during the current summer
session, Carl was not teaching then but we invited him and his
wife to at :end because we were sure our visitors would like to meet

117

him. Not long after everyone had arrived, and before we sat down-
to dinner, Carl was led by some comment or other to say, quite
loudly and clearly, that "no self-respecting scholar would ever
spend his time teaching in a summer session."

He also said, quite often, that he (and by implication any
other self-respecting scholar) would never serve as departmental
chairman. But after he left Berkeley to take a position at Brown
University, he did accept the chairmanship of their history
department. Rumor has it that he resigned, and his resignation was
accepted, on the second or third day of the appointment. Knowing
of his judgmental statements and demands about academic standards,
none of us at Berkeley was really surprised.

Lage: Why did Professor Bridenbaugh leave Berkeley?

Brown: This happened late in my first term as chairman, and it should not
have happened.

Lage: Why do you say that?

Brown: Because he was quite proud of his part in department-building and
surely was not interested in leaving Berkeley for a university
that, although quite strong, was not at the top of the academic
ladder.

Lage: Then why did he leave?

Brown: At lunch one day, he told me that he was going to leave the

university if the department did not apologize to him for some
terrible things that colleagues had said about him. He did not
tell me precisely what had been said, or who had said it. But he
was quite explicit about his desire to leave the university if no
apology was made. He knew that a tenure committee meeting was
coming up, said he would not attend, and indicated that he would be
waiting for an apology. I agreed to put the matter before the
tenure committee but must surely have expressed some doubts about
getting the committee to apologize for something about which most
members (including the chairman) knew little or nothing. Indeed I
must have felt that he was being a bit paranoid and petty.

Lage: What happened?

Brown: I have a vivid memory of what transpired at that tenure committee

meeting and recall that Henry and Ken (who along with Carl were our
three American-history Turks) quickly and explicitly said they had
no intention of agreeing to a departmental apology.

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Even when I said that Carl was sure to become receptive to an
offer from another university, their positions were not softened.
So no apology was made. I came away from the meeting quite
frustrated, feeling that we would soon lose our "chief Turk"
because, as I saw it, all three American-history colleagues were
being somewhat petty and obstinate.

It was therefore not much of a surprise when, a few months
later, Carl told me that he had accepted an offer from Brown
University.

Lage: You suggest that his departure should not have happened. Do you
think you should have handled this matter differently?

Brown: I have given a lot of thought to this question, especially since
Carl told me in no uncertain terms (at a farewell party given by
Ken's first wife Kay) that when the chips were down I failed him.
I have interpreted this to mean that he had not really wanted to
leave Berkeley and had been forced to accept an invitation from
Brown University only because I had not acted like a really good
friend and effective chairman.

I have long had the uncomfortable feeling that he was right.
It is possible that I was too busy with other pressing matters to
find out what had gone wrong in relationships between these three
American historians (three of the six Young Turks) or to discover
ways (other than asking for a departmental apology) of smoothing
rustled feathers. But it may be that Ken, Henry, and I were
getting a little sick of Carl's harping on the lack of quality in
the work of almost every historian mentioned, making us more and
more likely to do likewise, even about one of Carl's favored
students. I still remember that after several hours of
"conversation" with Carl I didn't feel that good about myself. So
although we valued Carl's contributions to the "revolution", and
were sure that our homework on new appointments would continue to
be carried more diligently if he stayed on, we seem not to have
been willing to exert ourselves in keeping him in Berkeley.

Lage: Were persons outside the department important figures in the
department's development?

Brown: Oh yes, especially Dean Lincoln Constance and Chancellor Clark

Kerr. Lincoln was our channel to the chancellor, and we had no way
of knowing how much of what he had to say increased the likelihood
of a recommendation being accepted by the chancellor. And of
course the chancellor made the final decision on all faculty
appointments and promotions, leaving us quite unsure as to whether
his personal support was insignificant or decisive. I do know,
however, that both Lincoln and Clark took personal pride in the

119

contributions they made to the rather sudden rise in the history
department's stature.

Probably both had something to do with the fact that no single
recommendation was ever rejected for lack of funds.

And as I said earlier, the power and independence of the
senate Budget Committee has always been important . It is
inconceivable that our minority report would have been accepted by
either the dean or the chancellor if such action had not already
been recommended by the Budget Committee.

Teaching, Research and Public University Service; Criteria for
Appointment and Promotion

Lage: When you looked at candidates, how much attention was given to

their personal qualities? Did you consider how a candidate would
fit into the department's culture? Did you look at wives?

Brown: We tried to consider everything. So we not only read all of a

candidate's publications but usually managed to observe him or her
in teaching situations. When thinking of offering a tenure
appointment at the associate professor level, we preferred that the
candidate come on a visiting appointment for at least one semester
or one quarter, giving us the opportunity to get acquainted with
the candidate before extending a formal offer. Rumors and movie
stories to the contrary, we made a serious attempt to disregard
such irrelevant matters as the good looks and wealth of a spouse,
or a candidate's connections with a member of the Board of Regents,
a winning football team, the right political party, or the correct
hobby. Students and taxpayers seem to assume that appointments and
promotions (especially decisions not to grant tenure) are
politically, racially, and /or sexually determined. And the way you
phrase your question, Ann, suggests that you too are not aware that
all selections, reviews, and recommendations must be made in terms
of three basic criteria: teaching, research, and university-public
service.

The Regents and the Academic Senate have periodically
redefined these three criteria. And there has been a continuing
debate over which of the three is, or should be, given the greatest
weight. Persons outside the university seem to place teaching and
public service above research, and to assume that research is
measured quantitatively.

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My several years of involvement in recommending and reviewing
appointments and promotions (within the department, throughout the
campus, and university-wide) lead me to make some generalizations
that may surprise you:

First, university regulations, throughout my more than forty
years on the faculty, consistently stipulated that recommendations
for promotion and appointment assign equal weight to teaching,
research, and public-university service.

Second, although the above three criteria have always been
assigned equal weight, some parts of the university have always,
because of their very nature, assigned more weight to one than to
another. For example the Education School logically assigns more
weight to teaching, physics to research, and public administration
to public service. Moreover, undergraduates tend to see more value
in teaching than in research while graduates tend to see just the
opposite. )

Third, from my experience as departmental chairman and as a
member of the Budget Committee, I have the sense that the
administrative positions a person has held within the university
weighed more heavily before 1956, that research became increasingly
important after 1956, and that teaching has been given more
attention since 1970. These trends suggest that after the faculty
"revolutions", research became more important, and that since the
student movements of the 1960s, greater stress has been placed on
teaching.

Fourth, our ideas about service, research, and teaching have
been constantly changing. The value of service is now measured not
so much by the number of administrative posts held as by the
quality of a person's administrative service; research is now
measured not so much by the number of books and articles written as
by their originality and creativity; and teaching is now measured
not so much by the number of students attracted to a teacher's
lectures as by the enthusiasm for learning generated in discussions
with that teacher.

Shifting Interests and Perspectives in History

Lage: What about new kinds of history? Was this a consideration? Were
there changes of emphasis?

Brown: Yes, we were always interested in the kind of history a candidate
was interested in. Indeed a selection committee for a new

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appointment was appointed only after the personnel committee had
asked and answered the "field-period" question: For what area of
the world, and for what period of that area's history, should the
history department be offering undergraduate and graduate courses?
Often that question would be answered without much study or debate
if the following two conditions existed: (a) undergraduate and
graduate courses in that area were well attended; and (b) the
professor teaching in that area was due to retire. If such
conditions existed, a search committee for an appointment in that
field and period was soon appointed.

But since we had a large number of history majors (usually in
the neighborhood of a thousand), and our graduate students were
numerous (in my early years at Berkeley when I was the department's
M.A. adviser, we usually had one hundred or more new M.A. students
a year), we were readily provided FTE for new appointments. It was
almost a "blank-check" situation in which the department's
personnel committee recommended (and we set selections committees
for) new appointments in the department's three traditional Euro-
American fields: U.S. history, Latin American history, and European
history. But new appointments were also made outside those
traditional fields: Chinese (Wakeman and Keightley) , Japanese
(Scheiner and Smith), and Russian (Malia and Riasanovsky) .
Appointments were also made in new historical fields: African, Near
Eastern, and Jewish. New appointments were made as well in one
field without geographical or temporal boundaries, the history of
science (Kuhn and Dupree) . Because so many appointments were made,
the size of the department increased from the time of the
"rebellion" in 1956 to the close of my second term as chairman in
1975.

But there was also a notable shift of interest to historians
who taught and wrote about a wider range of human experience (not
just political or economic change but cultural and intellectual
change as well) and whose teaching and research went beyond
description to interpretation and analysis: from writing
interesting stories about, or detailed and accurate chronological
reports on, what happened to raising and answering questions about
the meaning of what has happened, and still is happening, in human
history. While this general shift would probably be readily
recognized by most us, each would verbalize it differently since he
or she has found meaning and significance in different kinds of
change in different times and places.

For me at this point in time, and from my perspective as an
American specialist in Japanese history, I am inclined to find
meaning and significance mainly in the nature and power of
continuing interaction between authoritarian and liberal ideas and
behavior, an interaction that seems to have shaped and colored

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politics and religion (and therefore almost everything else) among
peoples at all times and places.

Lage: How did you judge the teaching? It is always said that people
didn't care about teaching at Berkeley.

Brown: Oh, we cared. We had to care because, as noted above, teaching was
one of the three established criteria for appointments and
promotions. Every recommendation had to include objective evidence
of effective teaching. After the student movement of the 1960's,
we were required to obtain evaluations of teaching from students
enrolled in every class. Thus when I, as chairman, wrote a
recommendation for promotion, I always had a stack of
questionnaires before me that had been filled out by students
enrolled in courses taught by a particular professor. I must say,
however, that these questionnaires were not that helpful, mainly
because most students had nothing but high praise for their
teachers and usually did not explain why they rated them so high.
There were always a few—even in the classes of a teacher who had
been selected as Berkeley's Teacher of the Year—who did not like a
given teacher, and said so in no uncertain terms. But these
negative evaluations, too, usually did not reveal just why the
teacher was disliked, leaving the impression that there had been
some personality conflict that revealed little or nothing about the
quality of the professor's teaching.

We came to feel that evaluations made by other teachers were
more helpful than student questionnaires. So whenever considering
a new appointment, we went out of our way to organize a colloquium
in which the candidate's lecture would be heard by several
colleagues, especially by those who taught and did their research
in the candidate's field. Statements by these colleagues about the
ability to teach made it possible for me to write something quite
concrete and specific on his or her ability to teach.

Lage: Would these things be discussed?

Brown: Absolutely. Everything was discussed at great length. [laughter]

Lage: What was the tenor of these discussions?

Brown: They were great fun, long, and windy.

Lage: What about the feelings between colleagues? Were the discussions
heated?

Brown: We never got angry. We had disagreements but the meetings of our

tenure committee (professors who were associate and full professors

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with tenure) were nearly always sparked by perceptive comments made
in good humor. I thought of them as intellectual feasts.

The Loyalty Oath Controversy

Lage: We didn't talk at all about the loyalty oath and what effect that
had on the department, how the department reacted to that.

Brown: There was a lot of strong feeling. That was when Kantorowicz left
us .

Lage: That is what I've heard. What was he like? Tell me a little bit
more about him.

Brown: I don't know too much about his background. I know from talking

with him that he was friendly, had a great sense of humor, and had
broad intellectual interests. He was highly regarded by his
students. He felt strongly about the loyalty oath and left because
of it. Others also felt strongly. I personally didn't get so
deeply involved. I signed the oath without too much hesitation. I
suppose I should have taken a stronger position about it, but
somehow it didn't bother me that much.

Lage: Was it divisive within the department?

Brown: No. I think it was pretty much an individual matter. No one held
anything against anyone else because of what he or she did or did
not do. I remember Jim King felt very strongly that the president
and the Regents were wrong in requiring us to take an oath that we
were not communists.

Lage: He was against it?

Brown: Yes.

Lage: It didn't become a situation of taking sides within the department?

Brown: No. We didn't divide up on that. The student uprising in the
sixties was a different matter.

Lage: We're going to get to that next time.

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The Gender Issue; Only One Woman History Professor

Lage: Are there any more things that you think we should talk about the
fifties and your first chairmanship? We didn't really talk
specifically about your chairmanship of the department [first term
as chair, 1957-1961] .

Brown: When I talked about our appointments and Carl Bridenbaugh's
influence, we were talking about the fifties.

Lage: Yes. In those days did anybody think about, Why don't we have more
women professors, or--

Brown: We had one or two.
Lage: You had one.

Brown: We had a very distinguished woman quite early, Adrienne Koch in
American history. She was with us quite early, and very
distinguished.

Lage: But with you gentlemen on search committees, did the gender issue
arise?

Brown: There was a feeling that we ought to have more women professors.
But we would not have favored the selection of one who didn't
measure up academically.

Lage: Were there very many in the hiring pool?

Brown: Usually not. For many of the positions to be filled, there

wouldn't be a single woman candidate. There just weren't that many
around. We would have welcomed the chance to extend an offer to a
woman if she had been academically qualified.

Lage: Okay. The question didn't come up too often, it seems, the way it
did later.

Brown: It just didn't come up, because it wasn't forced on us at that

time. Affirmative action was not yet passed by the courts and the
government.

Lage: Did Adrienne Koch take part in the governance of the department?

Brown: No, she didn't. I had a great respect for her but, for some

reason, she did not seem to be liked that much by her colleagues in
the American field. I don't think it was because she was a woman.

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She was not considered for such positions as chairman or vice
chairman of the department.

Lage: Would she serve on search committees and things like that?
Brown: Undoubtedly she did that. I can't remember the details.

Increasing Secretarial and Administrative Assistance as Department
Chair

Lage: I am just trying to get a picture of these earlier years.

Brown: One thing that stands out in my memory of those early years was
that we really had only one secretary (Mildred Radke) in a
department that had over twenty professors, about one hundred
teaching assistants, and several hundred graduate students working
for advanced degrees in history. That was a big problem on which I
spent hours and hours of time.

Lage: Why did it become a problem at that time?

Brown: It was a problem because a clear line existed between academic work
(teaching and research) and nonacademic work (filing, typing,
filling out reports, drawing up budgets, and administering
programs), and relatively well paid members of the academic staff
were using an increasingly large percent of their time on
nonacademic matters, thereby decreasing their time for, and
undoubtedly reducing the quality of, the work they were paid to do.
Most of us were writing letters and administering programs that
should have been handled by nonacademic members of the staff, which
was one secretary.

Lage: She must have been busy.

Brown: She was very busy, but there was so much that she couldn't do, and
much that she did not want to do. Chairmen who preceded me tried
to correct the situation by hiring secretaries, usually on a part-
time basis, to help her. But those hired to assist her usually did
not stay long, soon finding a job more to their liking. Mildred
was a very gentle and conscientious lady who was well liked by
everyone, especially the graduate students. She thought of herself
as the chairman's secretary and could not and would not assume
responsibility for anything as complicated as the budget and
administering a departmental office.

126

We felt that she should not only have more help but that we
ought to get someone else to do some of the clerical chores being
handled by the chairman or other members of the department. But we
couldn't move. The people hired to help would soon leave, and we
could not hire anyone to take over such matters as the budget
because a department of our size was entitled to only one
administrative assistant, a position that was held by Mildred
Radke. In talking with officials in the university's personnel
office, it became quite clear that if we wanted someone to handle
such difficult matters as the budget we had two options: either
have our present administrative assistant do it, or fire her and
get someone who could. And we couldn't fire her. She was doing
what she wanted to do very well, and everybody liked her. Neither
the department nor the union of nonacademic employees would have
put up with that. But it was pointed out, over and over, that our
department could have only one administrative assistant and that
position was held by Mildred Radke.

Lage: Regardless of size.

Brown: Possibly some units in the university were entitled to more than

one administrative assistant, but not the history department which,
along with English and political science and mathematics, was one
of the four largest departments on campus.

Finally we thought of making room for a new administrative
assistant by having Mildred take a lower rank, but retaining her
present salary. The personnel office said it could accept such an
arrangement if Mildred could. After long conversations with her,
she finally agreed to step down if she could keep her current
salary. She realized that we needed someone who would take on more
administrative responsibilities, and that she would soon be
retiring. We also tried to make the change easier for her by
putting her desk in a prominent place and giving her special
responsibilities with undergraduate majors, which numbered a
thousand or so at that time. Then we found a very able and
energetic woman to be our new administrative assistant, Janet
Purcell. Thereafter, a history department office gradually emerged
around the chairman's office on the fourth floor of Dwinelle Hall
and the big room beside it where hundreds of history majors and
graduate students came for information, all departmental telephone
calls were made, and secretarial services for the faculty were
centered. To the side of that big room was our faculty mail room.
And beside the chairman's office (and across the hall) additional
rooms were gradually acquired for the chairman's secretary, the
administrative assistant (Janet Purcell), an assistant to the
administrative assistant, an assistant for graduate studies, an
assistant for undergraduate studies, a secretary for the holders of
endowed chairs, and the storrge and copying of teaching and

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research materials. By the time Mildred retired, the office must
have had a staff of ten people.

Lage: It may be destined to get smaller again with the budget cuts.

Brown: Could be, but my guess is that cuts will come first in other areas:
fewer professors (there are already fewer members of the department
than when I retired); more professors at junior ranks (almost no
new appointments are now made at the tenure rank) ; and less money
for books, research materials, and travel. As teaching and
research become affected more by the use of electronic teaching
aids and computerized databases, the department will probably need
even more clerical assistance, not less, especially if our
department continues to hold the lead in creative teaching and
research.

Lage: What is secretarial assistance--isn' t it assistance for academic
work?

Brown: Certainly it is, but there is an area of assistance that is

nonacademic (which is done by secretaries and assistants who are
nonacademic employees of the university) and that is academic
(which is done by graduate students who serve as teaching and
research assistants and who are academic employees of the
university) . It is often difficult to draw the line separating
assistance from actual teaching, especially when a teaching
assistant spends more time with individual students than the
professor being assisted, and for research, when a research
assistant digs up most of the data incorporated in a research paper
published by the professor being assisted. Even secretaries must
feel that they are getting into teaching when helping a professor
write evaluations of research papers written by his students. But
the line is important: it differentiates assistance from the
academic functions of a university, without which the teaching and
research of a professor would suffer.

The value of assistance is easier to see in the fields of
science but more difficult, especially for the outsider, in the
humanities and social sciences. But unless that value is
recognized and funded, teaching and research in those disciplines
are sure to slide toward mediocrity and stagnation.

Nonacademic assistance is more often seen and measured in
terms of assistance to the teaching and research of an individual
professor but it is far more important for those who have taken on
administrative responsibilities (such as the chairmanship) and who
serve on key committees (such as special committees for new
academic appointments). The need is particularly heavy for the
committee appointed to decide which of the hundreds of applicants

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will be admitted to the graduate division for work toward the Ph.D.
degree in history. This heavy burden would be far heavier if there
was no assistant to open up all these packets, put the
recommendations and transcripts in order, make tables showing just
how each student compares with others in grades and SAT scores, and
handle other clerical chores.

Every new teaching program creates additional administrative
burdens that can be best handled, in terms of cost and the
teaching-research function of professors, by clerks and typists.
Let me give two examples of how two generously funded programs have
greatly enhanced teaching and research and, at the same time,
increased the need for additional help from the office staff. Such
administrative-assistance burdens are always increased with every
new generously supported teaching-research program; and a
distinguished department attracts, and is made more distinguished
by, these new programs. Almost every professor in the history
department regularly receives research grants that enable him or
her to take off as much as a full year for research and as
frequently as every three years. And each grant involves
considerable paperwork, much of which can and should be handled by
a secretary or assistant. Also, the department as a whole receives
generous grants that, while enhancing teaching and research, add to
the administrative burdens for which assistance is required.

Endowed Chairs and Professional Promotion Policies

Lage : What grants do you mean?

Brown: 1 would like to comment on two: our endowed chairs, and the so-
called anonymous fund.

When I was last chairman, we had five or six endowed chairs
and I hear that there are now at least two more. It now takes
around one million dollars to endow a chair. So everyone knows
that the history department has been generously treated. Each
endowment provides funds not merely for the salary of the chair
holder but support for teaching and research. But the department
is presented with the additional burden of budgeting and processing
all endowed-chair expenditures. [Editor's note—endowed chairs
have not traditionally paid the base salary of faculty who hold the
endowed chair.]

But before going into detail about my experience with that
particular administrative burden, I feel impelled to say something
about the larger question of whether we have used our endowments

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according to the wishes and expectations of the donors. I have an
uneasy feeling that those who have given the university millions of
dollars for chairs may have been thinking or assuming, as others
have, that these endowments would enable the department to hire
distinguished professors from other universities to teach and do
research in new fields of history. To my knowledge, no such
limitations have been spelled out in any of the existing
endowments, although some are limited to appointments in the fields
of American or European history. But I wonder if the donors or
their heirs would not be disturbed to find that (1) very few
appointments have gone to professors not already in the department,
and (2) the history department at Berkeley, with its six or more
chairs, has no more professors than the history department at UCLA
which, in my days at least, had no chairs at all. Those two points
may not bother living or prospective donors, but our presidents and
chancellors, in their endeavors to obtain more chairs should be
quite certain, not necessarily in writing, that the donors are not
motivated to endow chairs by hopes and expectations that are not
likely to be met.

Having aired one concern about our chairs, I might as well air
another. This is that the very existence of chairs, especially
since they tend to be awarded to persons already in the department,
creates a special professorial rank that a majority of our
professors can never attain. That is a break with the established
tradition—which I think most of my colleagues would agree has been
an important source of departmental strength- -that any man or woman
appointed to the position of assistant professor (a ladder
appointment) will never be prevented by the absence of a budgetary
provision (an FTE or full-time equivalent) from moving to the top
of the academic ladder.

Unlike Ivy League universities where there are never enough
budgetary slots at the associate professor level to permit the
promotion of every assistant professor to tenure, we have never
been constrained by such a situation. No blockage of this kind has
kept any assistant professor from rising to a higher rank or from
rising, at least during my years as chairman, to a higher pay scale
within his or her rank. But the existence of chairs does present
such blockage for a majority of our full professors. This surely
creates uncertainty, if not disappointment and resentment, for
many.

I know that this made George Guttridge, at least before he
himself was awarded a chair, wonder whether chairs were good for
the department. Others have claimed (with little or no valid
evidence to support their claims) that some professors have
accepted appointments at other institutions because they did not
receive, or saw no chance of receiving, a chair appointment at

130

Berkeley. I have detected no deterioration of collegiality as a
result of having chairs, but this "ladder blockage" is a concern I
feel impelled to draw to the attention of those who will be
involved in the department's future growth. A few things have been
done, and will surely continue to be done, to prevent non-chair-
holding professors from feeling that they have been demoted.

Which brings to mind a proposal that was brought before the
statewide Budget Committee when I was a member in 1965-66. This
was that we abandon the practice of considering every professor for
advancement to the next highest pay scale after a specified number
of years. The person proposing the change argued that (1) too many
professors were being advanced to higher pay scales whose teaching,
research, and service records were mediocre and (2) too many
outstanding professors were not being advanced far enough or fast
enough. Every member of that select Budget Committee except me
favored the proposal, maybe feeling that they were (or would like
to be) among the outstanding professors who should be treated
better.

Anyway, my objections were strong enough to convince the
statewide Budget Committee that we should check back with our
respective senates before putting the proposal to a vote. At the
next meeting, each member of the committee came back to announce
(in many cases with considerable surprise) that his particular
campus was overwhelmingly against dropping the tradition of
requiring a consideration of advancement after a prescribed number
of years. Most members of the Academic Senate on each campus must
have felt not only that they had been properly promoted and
advanced but that they did not want their university to gravitate
toward a situation, seen elsewhere, in which a professor assumes he
will not be promoted unless he obtains an offer of higher rank and
pay from some other university. Such a situation surely
constitutes a drag on, if not an obstruction to, creative teaching
and research.

In an attempt to avoid such discontent, I made a point of
trying, and usually succeeding, to obtain accelerated advancements
and promotions for professors with particularly strong teaching and
research records. And I am convinced that it was because of such
efforts that Joseph Levenson, for example, turned down offers from
Eastern universities before telling me that he had received those
offers.

In sum, I value our traditional policy of relatively regular
promotions and advancements and would not like to have it weakened
by the possession of so many, but not enough, good chairs.

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I say "not enough" with conviction because it is clear that
the chairs provide financially meaningful recognition for
outstanding historians and, in addition, give these professors
extra funds for teaching and research. Both add prestige to the
professors and their department, as well as luster to their
teaching and research records. So although I am concerned that our
use of the endowments may not be in accord with the hopes and
expectations of the donors and that, if we are not careful, the
chairs may lead to a deterioration of morale among those who are
destined to be no more than a professor of history, we should have
more chairs, not less.

-Lage: Didn't you want to say something about the administrative burden of
endowed chairs?

Brown: Yes, I would like to get back to that. One day during my second
term as chairman [1972-1975], it was revealed that each chair
endowment had a rather large sum of income that was not being used.
This was because the terms of each endowment stipulated that none
of its income, even savings created when a professor receives a
grant for full-time research, could be used except for the salary,
and research and teaching, of that particular chair holder. And
since each one of our chair holders was a distinguished scholar who
regularly receives such grants, his endowment had considerable
savings that could not be tapped even for the pay of a replacement
while a chair holder was on leave. After noticing a constant
increase in these savings for each chair, one of the budget
officers brought this to my attention. He was apparently uneasy
that these savings would continue to grow and eventually attract
the attention of auditors. He was sure that something ought to be
done, but he could think of nothing that would meet the terms of
the endowments.

This was the beginning of studies and discussions that took up
much of my time for months. After studying the terms of each
endowment, I became convinced that we would be acting in accord
with the expressed wishes of each donor if these savings were spent
to enhance the teaching and research of our chair holders. But
further consultation with budget officers convinced me that
dividing up the savings among the chair holders and allowing them
to spend the money for teaching and research in whatever way they
wanted would be unacceptable. That would have caught the eye of
university auditors looking for irregular expenditures of
nonbudgeted funds .

So then I talked with each chair holder in an attempt to find
out how he could best use the funds that had been accumulated in
his particular fund. Some saw no need for more research materials
or travel, or for additional research assistance, but all wanted

132

some help on typing, although not enough to warrant the employment
of a full-time secretary for each chair. That led to a plan by
which some savings from each chair were pooled for the employment
of one full-time secretary (equipped with a modern word processor)
to provide secretarial assistance to all chair holders. Then a
budget was drawn up to include other kinds of teaching and research
assistance that would be in accord with the needs and accumulated
savings of each chair.

Even when that was worked out, the budget officers balked:
they could not decide whether this was acceptable or not. Finally,
after I pressed them several times for an answer, a secretary
called to say that I could go ahead and spend the money as
proposed. But she made it quite clear that I would receive no
written approval for such action. As far as I know, the thousands
of dollars accumulated in the various chair funds every year are
still handled in that informal way. But each payment --whether for
a salary, computer, books, or travel- -must be documented and
reported, requiring considerable paperwork that, I hope, no longer
has to be done solely by the chairman.

Lage: The endowments do not support the salary of a professor, as I
understand it.

Brown: Yes it does, although in some cases the income from the endowment
does not cover the professor's full salary.

History Department Library, Lounge, and Telephones

Lage: You said that there was another area in which generous financial

support had increased the need for greater nonacademic assistance.
What was that?

Brown: I was referring to the surprising announcement, suddenly received
from the chancellor's office, that we would be receiving thousands
of dollars a year from an "anonymous fund" given by a donor who did
not want his or her name revealed. The income was from a block of
stocks given to the Berkeley campus to support teaching and
research in first one department and then another. When the income
exceeded a certain figure (one hundred thousand dollars I think it
was), the amount above that figure was to go to a second
department . And then when that department began to receive more
than that amount in a single year, a third department entered the
picture. Our department was surprised and pleased to hear that we
were second on the list, and that this money was to be used only
for the enrichment of teaching and research in nonbudgeted ways.

133

We had a windfall of thirty or forty thousand dollars to spend in
the very first year, and the amount continued to rise while I was
chairman. I presume the department continues to benefit from the
anonymous fund .

As you can imagine, much time was devoted to thinking up new
and better ways to use this money. In addition to setting up
special scholarships for promising and needy graduate students, we
established a student- teacher lounge (in which I recently attended
a colloquium session) and a history department library (where I
recently located a new book written by a colleague). Both of these
were instituted while I was chairman. Both took a lot of work to
establish and both required, and still require, a considerable time
and work (not academic in character) to maintain. So here we had,
and still have, a generous annual gift that enables the department
to strengthen its teaching and research in new and marvelous ways,
but that also increases our administrative burdens born by
nonacademic members of the staff.

Lage: It sounds so plush compared to today's worries about state budget
cuts.

Brown: It really did seem plush. All of that financial support may have
helped us to get good scholars to come, and to stay when they got
here.

Lage: And probably contributed to the life of the department and graduate
students, I would think, the kinds of things you are describing.

Brown: Yes. I was in that library recently and they tend to have, among

other things, all recent publications of the faculty in the history
department and the major books used in the upper division courses
so history students have ready access to the things they ought to
be reading.

Lage: Nice.
II

Brown: Yes. Both the lounge and the library were for extending and

deepening communication between professors and between professors
and their students, especially important in a department with a
faculty and student body as large as ours, and where classes,
especially for undergraduates, are so big.

Lage: I suppose other things were done to place professors in closer
contact with their students, and with each other.

134

Brown: Oh yes, two changes come to mind: one was minor but took a lot of
time and trouble, and one was a failure.

Lage: Let's first go into the troublesome one.

Brown: That was an attempt to get a regular telephone installed in each
professor's office. When we moved to Dwinelle Hall early in the
fifties, we had telephones that would enable us to do little more
than call and be called by others with an office in the same
building. It was impossible for us to call or be reached by a
student .

In an attempt get regular telephones I ran into first one
stone wall and then another. I assumed that the way to get
something like this done was begun by having our departmental
budget increased enough to cover the cost of installation and
operation. But to get a new budget entry of that sort required
documented cost estimates that would then be subjected to review.
And it was made clear that the reviewers would reject the request
if costs were disproportionately high for a department that had a
budget as low as ours.

I began following that rough and winding path when someone
suggested that I talk to Gloria Copeland, who was then (and
continued to be until her death) Chancellor Clark Kerr's secretary.
It didn't seem to me that a secretary could be of any help on a
problem of this sort, but I was getting frustrated. So I went to
see her. As soon as I told her my problem, she had a suggestion
that was amazingly simple and produced immediate results. It was
that I just go ahead and put a new telephone system in. Which I
did. I found that I had more authority as a departmental chairman
than I realized. Anyway, the cost was covered somehow and no
questions were asked. I still have trouble believing that this
nagging problem was solved so easily.

Experiments in Teaching: Lecture Classes and Proseminars

Lage: That is surprising. And what was that you tried to do that ended
in failure?

Brown: I tried to have lectures for the huge undergraduate course on

American history (History 17 A and B) recorded on tape and played
in different rooms at different times. I had this done after
circulating a questionnaire to all students enrolled in that class.
They were asked this question: Would you prefer to hear the
lectures given by an outstanding lecturer, and hear them on TV? Or

135

to hear lectures by an ordinary lecturer in a big classroom? There
was an overwhelming preference for hearing the lectures by the best
lecturer on tape. So I proceeded to ask Professor Charles Sellers,
who all agreed was the best lecturer in that huge required course
for lower division students, to give his lectures in Wheeler
Auditorium and have them taped for replays in small rooms around
the campus at different times of the day. We even arranged to give
all students enrolled in the course the opportunity to hear some
lectures directly in Wheeler Auditorium.

So the 1,500 or so students enrolled in the course were not
divided up into three or four huge sections taught by three or four
different professors but signed up for the one course taught by
Charles Sellers, some hearing him directly and others hearing only
on TV. And teaching assistants were on hand at the TV lectures so
that the students could become involved in discussions of the
questions raised. When the term was over, we again polled the
students to see whether they preferred this arrangement over the
former practice of dividing all enrolled students into three or
four sections taught by any American history professor who would
agree to take on that assignment. Again the results were
overwhelmingly in favor of taped lectures by an outstanding
lecturer, such as Charles Sellers.

But in the following year I took sabbatical leave to go to
Japan as a Fulbright scholar, which gave me full time for research
in Japan during the entire academic year. And during that year,
when Professor Kenneth Stampp was acting chairman, the experiment
was scuttled. I have never heard just why, but I assume that it
was opposed by colleagues who felt (quite strongly) that the
lecture system would be undermined by this approach and that
contact between students and professors would not be closer and
more personal but more mechanized and impersonal. They were right
so long as the saved teaching time was not used for tutorial or
small-group instruction. So I did not suggest that the taping
experiment be continued.

Lage: Were no other moves made toward small-class instruction?

Brown: Yes, there were two, one was quite successful and the other was
discontinued.

The successful one, initiated by the undergraduate committee
while I was chairman, required that every history major take two
successive proseminars in his chosen field of history. Since each
major must produce a substantial research paper toward the end of
these two proseminars, some students dread the requirement--
possibly the number of history majors has even declined because of
it. But some students become s> e: . cited by the research they go on

136

for deeper historical research in that same general area. Because
uhe research experience generates intellectual excitement in so
many, the department has continued to require two proseminars and I
hear that it has become a model followed by other departments.

Lage: And the one that was dropped?

Brown: That was the idea that the introductory lecture course for
undergraduates be taught jointly by two or three professors
specializing in different areas of the Far East, and that each
professor teach a proseminar-type section. I remember working with
David Keightley and Fred Wakeman in this way and finding that the
students in my small section on Japan, even though they were only
freshmen or sophomores, raised interesting questions and made
thoughtful comments about the character and significance of such
literary classics as the Tales of Genii and Kokoro . The papers
they wrote were surprisingly good. I am sure that many, if not
all, thought this was a great course, and that each participating
professor saw this an ideal way to teach it. But again the
experiment was dropped because there were not enough East Asian
professors to teach the course in this rather complicated way, year
after year.

Some Thoughts on the Value of Positive Learning and Proiect-
oriented Teaching

Lage: Do you think that instruction in history will continue to be

centered mainly on huge lecture courses in which there is little or
no contact (except through teaching assistants) with individual
students?

Brown: Since I was in Japan for ten years after retirement, I have not

been in close touch with the department's thoughts and plans about
the instructional program. But I have heard nothing to suggest
that any substantial change is being contemplated. And that I
regret, for I am convinced that teaching in the humanities and
social sciences generally (not just in history) will become more
ef fective--inducing more of the intellectual excitement that
enriches the learning process — if more of our students, beginning
with history majors, were to become engaged in what I call positive
learning (talking and writing), as opposed to negative learning
(listening and reading). Of course every form of instruction
involves a mixture of the two, and most individuals prefer one over
the other. But as teachers we should be concerned about what
produces the best results (the broader and deeper understanding of
human experience), not what is easiest and most interesting.

137

My own experience with lecturing and seminar teaching in the
university, as well as in the California Abroad Program and in the
Starr King School for the Ministry, makes me quite certain that
students are apt to become more excited about their study when
actively engaged in discussing questions, or writing out answers
for the review of their classmates and the teacher. This is more
likely to happen only, I am convinced, when they obtain a taste of
positive learning in a small-group teaching situation. But I don't
think that my colleagues feel as strongly as I do about the
importance of positive learning, and therefore you shouldn't hold
your breath until further advances toward small-group teaching are
made, especially since such advances will require (1) that the
number of pro-seminar type courses be increased by having each
professor give more of his her time to the teaching of small
courses, (2) that the number of lecture courses be reduced,
possibly by a greater use of tapes, and (3) that units of credit
for courses be measured differently: not so much in terms of how
many hours per week the professor is in contact with students, as
the number of hours per week each student is expected to spend
fulfilling the requirements for a course. Each of these changes
will be difficult to make, and are not apt to be made if there is
no special enthusiasm for what I call positive learning.

Lage: Can you give me an example of what you mean by positive learning?

Brown: I could give several, beginning with the excitement that I

personally experienced from preparing my own seminar papers as well
as from writing my M.A. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation, while I was
a graduate student at Stanford. But I would like to stress what
happened to a young economist who was studying at Doshisha
University when I was director of Japan's California Abroad
Program.

This was a young undergraduate economics major from Berkeley
who had already studied Japanese for two or more years (receiving A
grades) and was therefore admitted to Doshisha for enrollment in
Japanese economics lecture courses . After about two months he came
to complain that his studies were so boring and worthless that he
was thinking of dropping out of the program and returning to the
U.S. He said that the lectures were not only hard to understand
but contained nothing very interesting. Feeling that he ought to
be investigating some significant economic problem, and knowing
that nearly every Doshisha professor taught a seminar for
undergraduates who were required to write a graduation thesis, I
asked if there was not some aspect of the Japanese economic
situation that puzzled him and that he would like to investigate.

In the ensuing discussion he came up with two or three
economic questions that he was interested in. So I . ugp.ested that

138

he pick out the most Interesting question, do some reading and
thinking about it, and then go to the professor whose books and
courses were in or near that economic field and ask if the
professor would admit the student to his seminar for research on
that subject. The student's initial reaction was that the
professor would want his students to work only on problems he had
assigned and would not be interested in anything a foreign student
might want to explore. But I suggested that he first do some
reading and thinking about his problem and then go the professor
and tell him, in Japanese, just what he would like to do. Which he
did, and he came back the next day to say that, to his great
surprise, the professor was most enthusiastic about having a member
of his seminar work on that particular problem.

Then I worked with him on a course plan for the following
semester, one that was focused on his proposed seminar research. I
managed to give him extra units at UC for his seminar work, and
arranged for him to sign up for only lecture courses relevant to
his research, and suggested that he do what he could to focus his
study in those courses on matters connected with his seminar study
allowing him to spend most of his time on research.

Even before the new term began, I detected a definite change
of attitude; and within a month or so he had glowing reports of
exciting exchanges that he had had with his professor and with
fellow members of his seminar. Then I did not see him often, for
he was obviously immersed in study and had no time for socializing.
At the end of the term he handed his professor and me a fifty-one-
page report written in Japanese, a thoughtful and analytical
presentation that earned him a grade of A. At the end of the term,
he did not return to the U.S. immediately but stayed on in Japan
several more weeks more in order to do some further work on his
research project. Since then, I have not heard from him but my
guess is that he returned to Berkeley for graduate work in
economics and he is, or soon will be, a professor of some
distinction in East Asian economics.

When talking to my colleagues about the desirability of
creating course changes that will permit more history students to
go down the research track as early as possible, they tend to agree
that that is the graduate-student way for a student to become truly
excited about learning history. But they usually go on to express
the view that only a truly able and highly motivated student (not
the ordinary undergraduate) will elect to go down a road that
requires so much time and effort.

Lage: Isn't that true?

139

Brown: It is true that the ordinary undergraduate will not willingly sign
up for a course that is going to require a lot of work and, horror
of horrors, a long written paper. But my own experience, and what
I hear about the success of project-oriented teaching in secondary
schools, convinces me that almost any student (but especially a
history major at Berkeley) can and will discover, through
conversation with a thoughtful and empathetic teacher, some aspect
of his life and experience that he'd like to know more about.

When I was in Tokyo a few years ago, I read a newspaper
article about the successful results of an experiment being carried
out in an elementary school in Sacramento, a school that was
following the teachings of a pre-World War II French educator
(whose name I have forgotten) that project-oriented teaching is
likely to create a thirst for learning. I would like to locate
that school and find out more about the nature and results of its
approach. In a recent conversation with a teacher who deals only
with mentally handicapped children, I was told, quite emphatically,
that the project approach makes even a handicapped child amazingly
interested in learning.

Lage: So how do you think this approach could be worked into the history
department's instruction of history majors?

Brown: I do not envision a program that is radically different from what
we now have, but one that places research (a central aspect of
required proseminar and of graduate work toward an advanced degree)
at the core of the entire major program.

Lage: But would that lead a student toward over-specialization?

Brown: I don't think so. No undergraduate is likely to become excited

about what really happened in some unheard-of Civil War battle. He
or she is more likely to be curious about the broad cultural
significance (the economic, social, political, and even religious
ramifications) of sports (basketball), technology (interactive
computers), art (ballet), human relationships (love), group
dynamics (home), economic power (Haas [School of Business]),
political control (Willie Brown), education (UC), or spiritual
empowerment (Moonies). In discussions with a good teacher, a
student is sure to discover an urge (if he does not already have
one) to understand why something is interesting and personally
important. That could become the starting point of a life-long
search for answers and understanding that will continue to pay high
educational dividends, possibly producing scholarship.

The project approach (as it already exists at the graduate
level or as it might develop among undergraduates) is more likely
to lead to an increasingly deep and broad understanding of one or

140

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

more segments of human life, even among undergraduates who have no
liking for difficult courses in which written papers are required,
±f_ (1) a teacher is present who can and will stimulate, guide,
encourage, and help individual students to search—on their own--
for answers to questions that the students feel must be answered,
and (2) there are times and places where such a teacher can meet,
individually or in small groups, with students who are to be
introduced to the project approach to learning.

I think that most history professors are teachers who can
successfully lead undergraduate students into historical research,
and that the history department can and should set up and staff
enough proseminars to enable every history major to enroll in one
of these during every term of his junior and senior years at
Berkeley. But doing so will be difficult and troublesome and
costly, requiring a considerable decrease in the number of lecture
courses, a sharp increase in the number of small classes and
tutorials, a rather fundamental change in the idea of what
constitutes a unit of credit, less attention to examinations and
examination grades, and even different ideas about what constitutes
good teaching and being a good student. So such change is not
going to come soon. But I am convinced that this is the direction
in which a strong and innovative department will eventually move.

With your interest in teaching and all your administrative roles, I
wonder how you kept up your research and writing.

Well, I did not do as much as I would like to have done in either
administration or writing. But I kept working at both, actually
finishing my book on Nationalism in Japan while I was working
pretty hard at being director of the Asia Foundation in Hong Kong
there. I haven't gotten into that yet, have I?

That is going to come later. I want to get into your scholarly
work, but I thought we take care of this institutional-
Yes. I did try to organize my time and usually did not go down to
the university in the mornings. I would do my research and
preparation for my classes, the kinds of things I should be doing
as a professor, in the mornings at home. My colleagues and the
people at the office seemed to understand that. I was of course
available if some kind of a crisis came up, but I didn't get that
many calls. They realized what I was doing in the mornings. All
the other things, the departmental work, committee meetings, and
actually, my course teaching were done only in the afternoons.

Lage: Very good.

141

V THE TURBULENT 1960s AND 1970s ON THE BERKELEY CAMPUS
[Interview 4: April 11, 1995] *#

The Free Speech Movement and Its Effect on Teaching

Lage: Today we are going to start with all the turbulence on campus in
the sixties and what you remember of certain key events. Let's
start with the Free Speech Movement. In "64 that came to a head.

Brown: All right. Mario Savio and some of the incidents at Sather Gate I
recall very well. Especially when the Berkeley police got trapped
in a car at Sather Gate, and students were standing on top of it
and it couldn't move. Everybody was in a good humor. The police
couldn't get out, but people were bringing them cokes and snacks.
Cameramen were all around.

Lage: Did you go down and take a look at things?

Brown: I saw it, yes. I saw the car top being smashed in by too many
people standing on top of it.

The thing that impressed me most was the good humor of
everybody, the police and the students, even when the police were
surrounded and unable to move. Still there was good humor
everywhere.

The other incident I remember was when Sproul Hall was
occupied by the students. That was much more tense because the
police took students off to jail. My friend Bill Bouwsma's son
was taken in. Bill told me about going down to bail his son out.
That was a much more unpleasant development.

Faculty reactions varied greatly. Some got so disgusted that
they accepted offers at other universities. But there were
others, such as myself, who felt that teaching became more
interesting in the months and years that followed the Free Speech
Movement. It became more interesting because students seemed to

142

be constantly raising questions about social issues. They were
more thoughtful and kept raising questions about the relevance of
what was being taught, and how it was being taught. They were
asking, it seems to me now, whether the books they were reading
and the lectures they were hearing had any relevance to their own
immediate and personal problems, such as whether they should
obediently go to war against people on the other side of the
world, people who seemed to be no threat at all to the rich and
powerful United States. Were their studies helping them to
understand, and act responsibly about, racial discrimination in
this country? Were their studies helping them to understand
themselves and make the right decisions about the future?

In the face of such questions and concerns, I found that my
ideas about what to teach, and how to teach it, were changing. I
found myself not simply raising questions about Japanese history
that I thought were interesting but getting into problems that I
was sure would be relevant (and therefore interesting) to my
students. Indeed I am inclined to think that my later excitement
about positive teaching, noted above, arose from thoughts and
ideas that were made stronger, and more clearly articulated,
during those years of the Free Speech Movement when I was being
bombarded by questions of relevance.

As you will recall, I have come to feel rather strongly that
the focus of study by the undergraduate history major (and
probably all undergraduates in the whole of the humanities and
social sciences) should be focused on "positive" studying and
writing about a project or problem selected by the student
himself. Since the project would be selected by the student, it
would be one that he or she thinks is relevant (important) and one
likely to arouse a great thirst for learning.

Lage: Were these kinds of questions raised informally, or were they
subjects of formal meetings?

Brown: Both inside and outside of class. I liked that. The discussions
all became much more lively and interesting during that period.
Later on that kind of lively intellectual curiosity was not as
strong. Students became much more interested in training
themselves for a career. The old intellectual liveliness was
missing.

143

Faculty Politics; Committee of Two Hundred. Faculty Forum

Lage: In Henry May's book, he said there were serious threats to

scholarly detachment and to intellectual discipline. That is sort
of a negative take on it.

Brown: He was more or less on the other side of that fence. He was a
little bit turned off, I think, by student demands and student
complaints, and also by the so-called left-wing members of the
faculty known as the Committee of Two Hundred.

Lage: A faculty committee?

Brown: It was more like a faculty group or political party. In those

days the entire faculty was sharply divided into three groups or
parties. To the left were those who were very sympathetic to the
ideas and views expressed by the leaders of the Free Speech
Movement. They had regular meetings and referred to themselves as
the Committee of Two Hundred. Out of such meetings arose plans
for new courses and ways of teaching. I attended a meeting at
which one rather radical professor was asked a question phrased
something like this: "You have been talking about the desirability
of smashing the established order. What kind of order do you
think will emerge when and if our present one is smashed?" The
answer was: "I do not know. But it is bound to be better."

Not many went that far, but within the Committee of Two
Hundred a number of definite programs were developed for a "new
kind" of teaching. Several of these were quite popular and
aroused a good deal of interest but as far as I know none lasted.
But that should not be given as proof that the Free Speech
Movement had no effect whatsoever on education at the University
of California.

Lage: What were the effects if there were no definite changes in courses
or programs?

Brown: I have tried to say that my own ideas about what to teach and how
to teach were changed, and I have a feeling that the ideas of
other professors were also subjected, consciously or
unconsciously, to considerable change in and after the Free Speech
Movement of the 1960s. This is a problem in American intellectual
history where I am no specialist, and Henry May is. Henry would
probably deny that his ideas on education were changed during the
years of the Free Speech Movement . And so I have arrived at a
position that is probably at variance with those of our specialist
in American intellectual history. [See Henry May oral history
interview, in process]

144

But I dare to do this not only because I see change in my own
approach to the teaching of Japanese history but feel that I
detect such change in other members of the faculty.

Just a few days ago I was reading a statement made by Ira
Glaser of the American Civil Liberties Union. There he points out
that both the conservatives and the liberals make much of the
sharp turn that came in the thoughts of Americans about morality
after about 1960. He says that there are two competing visions
about what happened then: the "freedom" vision and the
"authoritarian" vision.

On the freedom side, Glaser places caring and thinking people
who understand that morality is not measured by what happens in
the privacy of the bedroom but by how society treats its people:
whether or not justice and fairness prevail; whether or not people
are equal before the law; and whether or not it is safe to be
different in a world in which the majority rules. On the
authoritarian side he places those who say that we are a nation in
moral decline: that "something terrible happened in the sixties
that loosened the wonderful moral bonds of the fifties."

Being on the side of freedom, as I am, Glaser goes on to say
that since the 1960s we have become fundamentally "more moral"
than we were in the 1950s. Then he goes on to say that the
authoritarian Merchants of Virtue (like Pat Robertson, William
Bennett, and Newt Gingrich) are close to winning the debate and
are imposing their pious standards of morality on private and
personal behavior. They are willing to punish people and force
them, by law, to observe only the style of personal behavior that
they approve. And they are willing to use the power of the state
to achieve their definition of morality.

Finally Glaser says that in the 1950s, in the days when the
authoritarian conservatives think everything was wonderful, women
were basically limited to the kitchen, racial segregation and
subjugation prevailed, gay men and lesbians were forced to live
secret lives of terror, disabled people were furtively hidden,
loyalty oaths were required, and people lost jobs for holding the
wrong views. All these badly treated people now—since the
movements of the 1960s--fare somewhat better.

This and other things I've read leave me with the distinct
impression that we came to think and act somewhat more humanely
after the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, which of course was
not limited to the Berkeley campus.

Lage: You mentioned three faculty groups, the Committee of Two Hundred
on the It ft. and what about the group to the right?

145

Brown: That group was not organized but was quite outspoken about how
wrongheaded the students were. Professors who associated
themselves with this group seemed to feel that anything the
students said was wrong and that all their demands must be
rejected. Most every department had professors who aligned
themselves with this conservative group and in some areas of the
university, such as in engineering, they were a strong majority.

Lage: How about the middle group?

Brown: That resulted in the formation of the Faculty Forum at the time of
electing members to the new Policy Committee.

Lage: A committee of the Academic Senate?

Brown: Yes, the Policy Committee was a new committee of the Senate. It
was set up to represent (to take action in behalf of) the Senate
on all policy issues. At that time of student unrest, important
issues were constantly arising and it was agreed that a strong
committee should be set up to handle such matters — it was
undoubtedly thought of as being parallel to the Budget Committee
which had been set up, back in 1923, to represent the faculty on
faculty appointments and promotions. But while members of the
Budget Committee were appointed by an elected committee (the
Committee on Committees), members of the new Policy Committee were
to be elected directly. It was a wise move to make and nobody
objected. But as the election approached, we found that the
Committee of Two Hundred was moving to seize control of this
powerful new Policy Committee.

Lage: How could they do that?

Brown: They made up a slate of candidates (not too many and not too few)
that all of their group would be urged to vote for.

Realizing what the "left" was up to, several in the history
department (including Martin Malia and myself) called a meeting of
people who we thought would want to do something to head off the
distinct possibility that academic policies would be placed under
the control of a radical minority that included less than 10
percent of the entire faculty. What we did was to set up our own
slate of candidates who would represent the views and feelings of
the large number of people who had not identified themselves with
either the right or the left. For the most part this middle group
had not been immersed in the debate over the Free Speech Movement.
They had continued to be immersed in their teaching and research,
often not even attending academic meetings. But most of us were
appalled to learn that the "left" was moving to take over the new
governing body of the Senate. And we began calling people in this

146

group, reminding them of what was going on and asking them to vote
for a few select "middle road" candidates. We also asked them to
do some calling on their own.

Lage: Who were some of the people involved?

Brown: There were a number from various parts of the university,

including departmental chairmen who were known to be persons of
considerable influence. Nat Glazer was there from sociology.
Martin Malia was also present and active. I was chosen as
chairman of the new Faculty Forum.

Lage: This was unusual, I would assume.

Brown: Yes, the first time this had happened. We almost succeeded too

well. We were a little bit unhappy that nearly all of our people
were elected.

Lage: I see. You wanted to get a mix on the committee?
Brown: A little more of a mixture would have been better.

Lage: Do you remember who came in as chairman of that committee as a
result of that vote?

Brown: No, I do not remember who became chairman, but I do recall that
the single left-wing candidate who won was Carl Schorske, also
from history.

Lage: This must have been right in the midst of the Free Speech
Movement, is that correct?

Brown: Probably in 1965 or 1966 when I was on the Budget Committee. I
was in Japan between 1967 and 1969.

Lage: That helps set it. Do you remember Alex Sherriffs?
Brown: I remember him, yes. He was on the conservative side.

Lage: We have an oral history with Alex Sherriffs from his Reagan

gubernatorial era. He says that the loudspeakers for the FSM were
kept in the history department office. I wondered if you knew or
recalled that?

Brown: I didn't know about that.

Lage: Neither does Gene Brucker. I don't know if it is true, but I just
thought --

i ">

147

Brown: I don't know either. It could very well have been. Somebody like
Charlie Sellers might have arranged that. But it wasn't a history
department action and did not have history department approval, I
am quite sure.

Lage: So were most of the history department moderates?
Brown: Yes, I would say most of them.

Lage: Was there tolerance for different points of view within the
department?

Brown: Feelings ran fairly high.

Professor Franz Schurmann

Brown: [H.] Franz Schurmann, do you recall his name?
Lage: Yes.

Brown: He was very much on the left. So much so that he was quite

intolerant of those who did not feel as he did about the Tightness
of what the students were saying and doing. He would not even
speak to some of his colleagues on the right, but was more decent
to those of us in the middle.

Did I tell you about his coming in to see me one day? I hope
this wasn't skipped.

Lage: I think you told me off the tape when we were just meeting
informally, but we want to be sure not to skip it.

Brown: He, along with Charles Sellers, was one of the most active
supporters of the Free Speech Movement.

Lage: What was his field?

Brown: He held a joint appointment in history and sociology, and in
history he taught courses in the history of China.

His appointment in two different departments came about
because he had such a wide range of interests and capabilities
that Chancellor Kerr, who was among those who wanted to have him
appointed, asked him what he would like to teach. And his reply
was that he would prefer to teach courses in history and
sociolojy. He had come to Berkeley soon after receiving his Ph.D.

148

at Columbia to teach courses, as I recall, ir some Eastern
language such as Persian. Quite soon, he impressed a number of
people with his knowledge of so many Asian languages and with the
depth of his knowledge of the history and culture of several Asian
societies. So when he indicated that he would like to have a
half-time appointment in history, a committee was set up and a
half-time appointment was recommended. Joseph Levenson, who later
wrote a book with Schurmann entitled China: An Interpretive
History, must have been a strong supporter of the appointment.

Lage: He was an impressive person.

Brown: He was impressive. I remember having lunch with him and a

Japanese visiting professor who knew little or no English. Franz
held his own in our discussion of problems in Japanese history,
although he had done more work in other languages (such as
Chinese) and in the culture of other parts of Asia.

But some time in the seventies, during my second term as
chairman, Franz came into my office after completing the final
lecture in his course on medieval Chinese history to announce that
he never wanted to teach that course again. I was startled, to
say the least, because he had originally wanted to teach in that
field and I knew that around 200 students were enrolled every time
he taught it. I learned that now, after the Free Speech Movement,
he no longer was interested in the early social and intellectual
history of China. When I asked him what he wanted to teach, he
said he would rather teach a course on something like power
politics and Asia.

Lage: I think he was interested in Vietnam especially, I remember his
getting very involved with the anti-Vietnam war movement.

Brown: That's right. He had just published a big and interesting book
entitled The Logic of World Power: An Inquiry into the Origins.
Currents, and Contradictions of World Power [Pantheon, 1974].

Lage: It was probably centered on China.

Brown: Yes, but not entirely. I remember reading the book and

discovering that it was essentially a comparative analysis of
three communist revolutions: the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cuban
ones. And the setting of all three was world politics. Anyway, I
asked him what he wanted to teach, and he indicated that he wanted
to teach a course in that general area.

Lage: A course in revolution.

149

Brown: It wasn't entitled that. I have forgotten what the title was. By
then we had an undergraduate proseminar course that any professor
could teach, and so there was no problem in getting him signed up
for a proseminar in the area of his current intellectual interest.
I remember hearing him say that he liked the new assignment.

Determining Curriculum; Coverage and Faculty Interest

Brown: Which brings me to the view that I have often expressed, that a
professor really ought to teach in the area of his research
interests. I tried to apply that principle to other cases, one
such as Bill Bouwsma, who had been doing research in the field of
Christian history. I asked him one day why he didn't teach a
survey course in Christian history. He said he would like to do
that, and he did. He has continued to teach it after retirement.
This has always been a popular course and he likes it.

Lage: Is that the way a new curriculum is developed?

Brown: Yes and no. Traditionally courses in history have been set up and
assigned in accordance with what I call the coverage principle,
which means that survey lecture courses (as well as graduate
seminars) exist for all the main cultures of the world. Years ago
it was decided that we should have survey lecture courses on the
United States, Latin America, England, Germany, France, Italy,
Spain, Russia, China, and Japan. Later, professors were hired to
teach courses on India, the Near East, and Africa. What was
taught in these courses varied with the research interests of the
professors teaching them, but the course pattern was generally in
accord with the coverage principle.

But in recent years (since the Free Speech Movement), there
has been a change. As the catalogue indicates, more and more
courses are on historical issues of special interest to the
professors teaching them. Thus courses are now being defined not
simply in terms of coverage but according to the interests of the
professors teaching them.

Lage: Is that usually done with the department chair rather than a
curriculum committee?

Brown: There is a course committee in the university that approves all
courses .

Lage:

In the Academic Senate?

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Brown: There was, and probably still is, a course committee for each
college. As I recall, whenever a professor or his department
wants to set up a new course, a form has to be filled out
indicating the title, the number of units of credit a student will
earn by taking the course, the course number (all upper-division
courses have a three-digit number beginning with one), and a short
description. The chairman sends that on to the course committee,
which gives its approval if the usual academic standards are being
met.

Lage: So, really, your hiring of faculty is the thing that eventually
determines your curriculum?

Brown: It goes both ways. The traditional course offerings have much to
do with the department's decision to recommend a new faculty
appointment. That is, if the professor teaching a well-
established course retires or moves to another university, the
department commonly assumes that there should be a replacement who
specializes in that same field of history. But the character of
the course is sure to reflect the interests of the new appointee
who may, in addition, redefine the course or offer one or more new
ones in or near that same field.

Lage: There have been a lot of changes over the years.
Brown: Yes.

Brown Helps Prevent an All-University Strike, December 1966

Lage: Let's get back into these turbulent times. When there was so much
uproar on the campus, was there dif f iculty--you mentioned some
professors left. I don't know if you want to talk about specific
cases, but was it difficult to recruit faculty?

Brown: There weren't that many who left, and it wasn't that serious. But
there were a few.

Lage: Anyone from history?

Brown: Henry Rosovsky, who was in my field of Japanese economic history,
left at that time and went to Harvard. He has become a very
distinguished dean at Harvard, and it was reported that he
received an offer to be president of Yale, which he turned down.
He left at the time of the Free Speech Movement.

Lage: Do you think he left because of that?

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Brown: He often said that was his major reason for leaving, but there
were undoubtedly other factors. Just the chance to go back to
Harvard may have been a major one.

Lage: Is that still a great attraction overall?

Brown: It depends on the person. As I think I have had occasion to

mention, Bill Bouwsma went to Harvard and came back. He liked it
better here than there. One can never be absolutely sure why
anyone decides to leave—a spouse's preference for life in one
area or another often makes more of a difference than we realize.

Lage: Right. Without it being mentioned anywhere.

I am wondering about your role in heading off an impending
strike. I know that you can't recall the year of that incident
precisely. Could it have been in this earlier period, during the
FSM? Did it have anything to do with the meeting at the Greek
Theatre?

Brown: No, the Greek Theatre episode and the threatened strike were about
a year apart. It must have been in 1964, after the resignation of
Chancellor Strong, that the famous meeting was held at the Greek
Theatre. Thousands of students and teachers, as well as the press
and the police, were present to fill the Greek Theatre. Since
there was no chancellor at the time, center stage was occupied by
the deans and departmental chairmen who had apparently selected
Robert Scalapino, then chairman of the political science
department, to be their spokesman. The most dramatic point in the
meeting came when Bob was just beginning to make his speech.
Mario Savio suddenly appeared on the south side of the stage,
walked slowly toward the podium where Bob was standing,
deliberately took the mike from Bob, and began to make his own
speech as Bob meekly retired to his seat and students were
applauding wildly.

Joe Levenson later made this apt remark that went something
like this: "In one minute Bob was the leading candidate for the
position of chancellor, but in the next he was just an ordinary
professor." Not only was Bob's position in the university
undermined, but his views toward students and the Free Speech
Movement were greatly changed. Until that moment, he seems to
have thought of himself as understanding the students and what
they were saying. But after that, and apparently because of it,
he became very critical of what the students were demanding and
doing. So that by the time of the threatened strike, he was
definitely aligned with right-wing members of the faculty who were
disinclined to accept any of the demands linked to the calling of
a general strike.

152

Lage: Tell what happened. You mentioned taking a role in developing a
faculty resolution that ended the strike.

Brown: My part in what I call "the strike weekend" began with my reading
the Daily Cal [Californian] on Friday evening. In it I read about
a large number of students voting to call for a general boycott of
classes after the following Monday unless the chancellor dropped
all charges against student leaders and accepted certain other
demands. The thousands attending the meetings, plus the support
they were receiving from the faculty throughout the university,
suggested that most classes really would not be held after the
following Monday. Moreover, statements made by university
officials left the strong impression that student demands could
not and would not be met. The situation looked pretty bad.

As I mulled over the matter during that rather sleepless
Friday night, I gradually came to the conclusion that a way could
be found to stop the strike. (I suppose that being chairman of
both the Berkeley and statewide Budget Committees at that time had
something to do with the feeling that I could and should do
something to head off a general strike.) The idea was to have the
Academic Senate pass a resolution that would urge the chancellor
to drop disciplinary charges against the students and also to
yield to the more reasonable parts of their other demands.

I drafted a resolution that I thought most of the faculty
could accept and that might defuse the student mood for a strike.
But before getting in touch with the current chairman of the
Academic Senate about calling a special meeting and contacting
other senate leaders in an attempt to formulate a resolution that
would produce the desired results, I asked my colleague and friend
Irv [Irwin] Scheiner to come down to my house to talk over the
situation with me. That session with Irv made me confident that
this was the direction in which to move.

The remainder of that rainy weekend was spent in meeting the
chancellor, officers of the senate, chairmen of senate committees,
departmental chairmen, and leaders of various faculty groups to do
two things. First, arrange for a special meeting of the senate
the following Monday morning. Second, see what individuals
thought ought to be added to or subtracted from the proposed
resolution. It was literally and figuratively a stormy weekend.
Just a few minutes before the Senate meeting in Wheeler
Auditorium, Chancellor Roger Heyns called me into his office and
asked that a further revision be made. It was a tougher response
that I could not accept, one that I thought the faculty would
reject.

153

In the various weekend consultations it had been agreed that
the resolution should be introduced by Mike Heyman, who was then
chairman of the Senate Policy Committee. We also made sure that
certain individuals who we had worked with on the wording of the
resolution, and who were on the fringe of the left or the right,
would speak in its support.

That senate meeting in Wheeler Auditorium was attended by
nearly a thousand professors, probably more than had attended any
other meeting during the years of the Free Speech Movement.
Students were crowded outside the front door listening to the
proceedings by loudspeakers.

Speeches in support of the resolution were thoughtful and
convincing, but opposition was expressed by both the right and the
left. A motion was made to revise the wording but was voted down.
Then the resolution was passed by an overwhelming majority vote.
[See Appendix A]

As we were leaving Wheeler Hall after the meeting, we were
amazed to see hundreds, maybe thousands, of students lined up on
each side of the Wheeler steps, clapping and cheering as we left.
Since the students had been listening to the proceedings by
loudspeaker, they knew exactly what had happened and were
obviously pleased that the faculty had made a sympathetic and
reasonable response to their demands. Such spontaneous applause
from so many made us quite sure that popular backing for the
strike had been dispelled. And it had.

Although I did not participate in the senate proceedings of
that day (neither making the motion or speaking in favor of it),
it was generally known that I had been involved in formulating the
resolution. I was therefore thanked and congratulated by many.
But I was taken aback by two conflicting comments about the role I
had played. One was by a political scientist affiliated with the
right. And the other by a historian on the left.

The right-wing political scientist was my friend Robert
Scalapino, who called to say, that same Monday evening and with a
tone of sadness and anger, that I (Delmer M. Brown) had "sold the
university down the creek."

The historian was Professor Carl Schorske, the only left-
winger elected to the Senate Policy Committee, who is said to have
made this hyperbolic statement to a mutual friend (William
Bouwsma) : "Delmer has singled-handedly saved the university."
[laughter]

154

If Carl really did say something like that, it suggests that
the resolution was closer to the leftists than to the rightists.
That we did stand left of center was suggested by a question
raised by Professor Lynn White when he was serving with me on the
statewide Budget Committee. It was right after our Berkeley
senate meeting that he blurted out: "Has the Berkeley faculty lost
its senses?" He wasn't really expecting an answer and I did not
try to give him one.

Lage: You were definitely behind the scenes.
Brown: I certainly was not out in front.

Lage: I am curious as to why it was an Academic Senate response rather
than an administration response. It seemed that most of the
demands, the students put to the administration.

Brown: Yes, the demands were against the administration, but the
administration was in a hole and seemed to realize it. An
increasingly large number of students were making a stand for the
right to speak out against racial discrimination and against being
drafted into a seemingly senseless war being fought on the other
side of the globe. The anger was initially and basically directed
toward a government that was responsible for the enactment and
enforcement of laws rooted in racism, and in the right of the
state to force all able-bodied men to put their lives on the line
at a time of war, even if the war did not seem to be for national
defense. But their anger was gradually directed against the
university when chancellors, vice chancellors, and student deans
began to discipline students who were opposed to enforcement of
such objectionable laws and regulations.

As is well known, the Free Speech Movement all began when
students were disciplined by the university for using a table,
located a few feet inside university grounds, for organized
political protest. That was followed by the enforcement of other
restrictive rules, such as ones against the use of loudspeakers on
campus, particularly on the steps of Sproul Hall. But the
movement was made far more intense by the enforcement of rules
against campus "sit-ins," resulting in more than a hundred
students being hauled off to jail. It was then that Chancellor
Edward Strong was forced to resign, creating the unsettled
situation in which Mario Savio snatched the microphone from Bob
Scalapino at the Greek Theatre.

I had had considerable contact with Chancellor Heyns before
the students called for a general strike in 1965. As one of the
seven or eight professors appointed to the Faculty Search
Committee which recommended his appointment as chancellor, and

155

having attended the meeting that the committee had had with him
before he decided to accept the offer, I was somewhat familiar
with his outstanding administrative record. I had moreover become
quite sure that he would be just the kind of chancellor we needed
at that time. And he did prove to be very astute in the handling
of student intransigence.

Nevertheless, there was a gradual buildup of discontent that
led to the threat of a strike not many months after his arrival.
I do not remember the details of students' complaints in those
early days of the Heyns chancellorship, but know that more and
more students were becoming irritated that their leaders were
being penalized, over and over, by infractions of rules and
regulations that were thought to restrict their freedom of speech.
So their number-one demand was that all penalties against their
leaders be dropped.

Beyond that, the students were insisting that the university
discontinue using Berkeley police for the enforcement of
university regulations and that students be represented on senate
committees. Chancellor Heyns undoubtedly felt, as probably most
any other university administrator would have felt under similar
circumstances, that he could not yield to such demands,
particularly to the one that penalties for violations of
university rules and regulations be dropped. So the unrest
continued to mount, reaching a degree of intensity that made it
look quite certain that a general strike would begin on the
following Monday. The chancellor apparently felt that he could
not yield to such demands, especially since the Regents and the
public at large expected him to reestablish control over his
"unruly" students.

But those who worked together on the senate resolution felt
that the faculty could do something that could not be done by the
chancellor, although I do not recall anyone explaining our actions
in that way. Chancellor Heyns probably realized that by allowing,
even cooperating with, those of us pressing for a senate
resolution, he was extracting himself from a rather nasty bind.
Again, I don't think anyone saw his activity or non-activity in
this way at that time. But by leaning on the faculty to do
something that would head off the strike, allowing the faculty to
take the blame for being soft on students, he avoided taking
either of two rather treacherous courses of action.

The first was to compromise with the students, which would
probably have driven the Regents to fire him. And if the
chancellor had taken the opposite law-and-order course (enforcing
university regulations even more strictly), he and the university
probably would have been plagued by more disruption for a much

156

longer time. That too might have led to his resignation or
dismissal. So he appears to have decided to sit back and let the
faculty take the lead, but without ever saying (maybe even to
himself) that this was his intent. My son Ren has suggested that
the chancellor may also have realized that the students had worked
themselves up into such a stew about the unfairness and
arbitrariness of university administrators (indeed of all persons
in positions of authority) that they would have been suspicious or
irritated by any statement or decision he might have made.

So the faculty's "compromise" resolution was accepted by both
the chancellor and the students, and the strike fizzled out. In a
sense the faculty did something that the chancellor could not have
done. But it should be pointed out that the resolution was not an
administrative act but a set of recommendations made by an
overwhelming majority of the faculty. In sum, the students could
and did take the advice of their teachers, even though they were
in no mood to listen to another decision or statement made by a
university official. [See Chapter VI for a fuller account of this
incident . ]

Opposing Visions: Control or Freedom ##

Brown: While the resolution seems to have removed the threat of a general
strike, it led the public to bracket the Berkeley faculty with
their radical students and the Free Speech Movement. Gradually
the Regents and the general public (as well as Lynn White and
other conservative professors) became more vociferous in their
condemnation of students and faculty for a "radicalism" that they
claimed had gotten out of hand.

As the conservative view spread throughout the state and was
directed at students and faculty in all parts of the university
system, Clark Kerr's position as university president was
weakened. This seems to have been due largely to what was being
said in the media about the university, but especially in
political speeches by the governor. More and more people were
holding Clark personally responsible for the radical behavior of
both faculty and students; and about two years after the Senate
resolution was passed, Clark was fired by the Regents at a meeting
attended by the governor.

As a member of the statewide Budget Committee at the time, I
was privileged to be sitting where I could see and hear what the
Regentr were saying and doing on that historic occasion. Like
other iaeml ers of the faculty present, I tended to think of the

157

Regents who opposed the president as political pawns of the
governor. But I don't think I realized how much they were being
influenced by an electorate that, under the influence of the
governor's campaign speeches, had come to hold President Kerr
personally responsible for the "radicalism" that was "running
rampant" on UC campuses. Chancellor Heyns's position, too, was
apparently undermined, but he did not resign until 1971.

Lage: Were you associated with Chancellor Heyns at other times of
student trouble?

Brown: Yes, in 1971 (the first year of my second term as departmental

chairman and Roger's last year as chancellor) I was at one of the
chancellor's regular meetings with departmental chairmen when he
asked if it was not about time to reinstitute the regulation
against the use of loudspeakers on the steps of Sproul Hall. He
went on to say that the situation had quieted down to such a point
that he was inclined to think the students would not be much
interested in whether or not loudspeakers could be used at a place
near university classrooms.

Most of us were appalled that he should even be thinking of
such a move. He did not seem to realize what a powerful symbol of
the Free Speech Movement loudspeakers had become. We finally
convinced him that such action would surely rekindle the Free
Speech Movement, and he dropped it.

It made us wonder why he had brought it up. He was surely
wishing, consciously or unconsciously, to be pictured as a strong
chancellor who had finally succeeded in bringing the Free Speech
Movement under control, apparently not realizing that historically
any new freedom (especially if it was linked with a strong popular
movement) can seldom be destroyed by those from whom it was
originally taken. But Roger was obviously thinking and acting
like a good chancellor, trying to stay on the good side of the
Regents and the public, and was not thinking of himself as a
champion of freedom.

Lage: So do you now think you saved or undermined the university by
fathering a Senate resolution that stopped the strike?

Brown: I alone did virtually nothing. I have been talking mainly about
what I did and thought at particular times in the past, which has
prompted me to say things that may give the impression that I am
taking credit for action taken by many members of the faculty. I
do take credit for initiating the first moves on that rainy
weekend. But what followed could have happened only because many
others wanted to do something to head off a breakdown of the
educational process.

158

Now, as to whether what was done saved or destroyed the
university, I would say that it "saved" us to the extent that it
prevented a lengthy cessation of instruction. And since Berkeley
still ranks, according to most assessments, as one of the leading
universities of the country, we can logically conclude that UC was
not "sold down the creek." But who knows what the university
would be like if its authorities had succeeded in keeping the Free
Speech Movement under "control"? Or if there had been a general
strike that lasted weeks and weeks?

What one is likely to conclude about the effects of faculty
action on that occasion depends on whether he or she stands on the
side of control (an authoritarian) or on the side of freedom (a
liberal). I am pleased to be identified as a liberal. Which
means that, old as I am, I am delighted whenever I or another
human individual achieves freedom, with responsibility, from
arbitrary authoritarian control: control that provides no benefit
to those under control and only maintains and increases power for
the controllers. So my answer to your question has a noticeable
liberal bias.

More on Effective Teaching and Educational Reform

Lage : Is there more to say about the effects of the Free Speech Movement
on the quality of undergraduate teaching?

Brown: I feel that my own ideas about effective teaching changed after
the Free Speech Movement. I have already talked about a growing
preference for encouraging all students, even at the undergraduate
level, to center their study on a problem, question, or project
that is important to individual students.

Since those turbulent times, I have come gradually to feel
that the university needs to change undergraduate instruction
rather drastically. It should be moved, I think, in the direction
of project-oriented study centered on questions that a student
raises and that impels him or her to spend more time on writing,
talking, and thinking about what he reads and hears, and less time
on listening, memorizing, and quoting what others have written or
said.

But if a meaningful shift is made in that direction, we will
have to drop, or drastically revise, the old system of giving
fifteen hours of credit to a student for fifteen hours of contact
with a professor, making little or no distinction between three
contact hours per week in a lecture course attended by 800

159

students and three hours per week in an undergraduate seminar for
ten. Credit should be given, as I see it, for the hours that a
student spends in all types of learning, not just that which is
centered on listening to lectures and reading the books
recommended or required by the lecturer. More importantly, we
should give him credit for time spent, under professorial
guidance, on the investigation of a problem of his or her own
choosing. That would mean credit for time spent on writing,
reading, and discussing his or her project with others. Learning
of this positive type should take up at least half of the time an
undergraduate student spends on learning at a good university like
the University of California.

Lage: A proseminar would then be half of the full unit load?

Brown: At least. And it should yield at least one half of the credit a
student receives for a week's work during a given quarter or
semester.

Lage: And a proseminar would also be half of a professor's teaching
load?

Brown: Yes, but that brings up another knotty problem: how should a

professor's teaching load be measured? That too will have to be
changed if we make a meaningful shift toward what I call positive
learning and teaching.

Lage: What kind of a change do you think should be made?

Brown: It is generally assumed that a professor should devote about half
of his time to teaching and the other half to research, with
administrative responsibilities entitling him or her to an
appropriate reduction in teaching. That provides a rough but
acceptable and flexible yardstick.

But if we turn to positive learning and teaching, we will have
to figure out a different way of measuring a professor's teaching
load. Just what kind of a change should be made will have to be
worked out by the faculty in consultation with the administration,
and it will have to be understood and accepted not only by faculty
and students but by Regents and taxpayers as well.

But by measuring the teaching load at present, we keep the
emphasis on lectures in concrete. An hour of teaching a small
class in which students are engaged in investigating particular
historical problems is not so time-consuming as preparing for and
delivering a one-hour lecture, mainly because teaching in a small
class is centered or the problems and questions that a student

160

raises after the reading, writing, and talking that he has done
since the last meeting.

If we are going to provide enough small-class courses to keep
the expense down, we will have to make the following interrelated
changes: (1) Increase the number of courses each professor teaches
without creating a situation in which he or she will be spending
more than one-half of his or her time on teaching-related work;
(2) Increase the number of small courses taught by each professor
while decreasing the number of his or her lectures (logically a
rigid formula should be avoided since some professors will prefer
to lecture and others may decide never to lecture again); (3)
Decrease the number of hours that a student is required to spend
in a class every week by giving him learning credit for time spent
in preparation for small classes; and (4) Increase the number of
small-class courses, and decrease the number of lecture courses,
that each student takes. Just how far we should go in each of
these four directions will require considerable study,
consultation, and even experimentation. That probably means
nothing will happen, although I am still convinced that we should
make undergraduate study — in history at least—more interesting,
exciting, and "relevant."

Most professors in history will probably say that they favor
the positive approach but still oppose extending it to
undergraduates for one or both of the following reasons:
undergraduates are not interested in, or capable of, investigative
study; and, it will cost too much.

As I have tried to say somewhere above, even the dullest
student can become excited (under the guidance of a good teacher)
about positive learning. Moreover, I feel certain that a positive
program can be devised that will cost no more money than we are
now spending.

But even if my colleagues can be convinced that their reasons
for objecting are wrong, they probably will still oppose change.
Consciously or unconsciously, they probably will still prefer
talking to a captured audience about their historical findings (I
still like doing that so much that I still accept almost every
invitation to talk about my research, even though I usually
receive little or no honorarium) . And about this business of
trying to stimulate an ordinary undergraduate to become excited
about historical investigation, they are likely to say something
like this: "That is for the birds. I do not have to do that even
for graduate students—they already have it or they would not sign
up for my seminar."

161

So nothing is likely to happen, which I deplore. Our
university rates high mainly because of the creative research done
by members of the faculty in so many disciplines. But why should
it not also rate high for its teaching? If positive learning
creates excitement for making an in-depth study of and writing
about a special problem, why shouldn't our undergraduates (as well
as our graduates and the students at various small colleges) be
leaders in that kind of learning and teaching?

Lage: Is it possible for such change to be made by a strong chancellor
or president?

Brown: Possible, but not likely. It is hard to think of any chancellor

or president as having that much interest in positive learning and
teaching. As is generally known, administrators at big
universities are now selected mainly, it seems, for their ability
to raise money.

So I can not see such changes occurring because they are
pressed by a strong chancellor or president. For that matter, no
such change is likely to be made by a faculty committee. Even if
a committee made up of thoughtful professors interested in the
improvement of teaching came up with some excellent
recommendations, these are sure to be emasculated or disregarded
for convincing reasons. The entire endeavor is likely to end up
as an experiment that is abandoned because of the lack of teachers
and money.

Faculty Conservatism Regarding Educational Change

Lage: You gave a breakdown of faculty politics — left wing, right wing,
and the great middle. Is there a similar breakdown of
conservatism and new ideas toward education?

Brown: There is this kind of split in most departments. I don't know
that there is a parallel with attitudes toward students—there
might be. The people on the left side may be the ones who are
more inclined to consider new ways of teaching, although I hadn't
quite thought of it that way. But I think the people on the
conservative side may also be the ones more likely to oppose new
kinds of teaching. I don't know.

Lage: I have heard people say that the faculty is basically quite a

conservative body about issues of educational change and what is
called faculty welfare under the faculty committee. Would you
agree with that?

162

Brown: Oh, that's true. There's no doubt about that. Most of us like to
keep things as they are.

Lage: In those types of issues, do you think the faculty is basically
conservative?

Brown: I think so. Again, it is dangerous to draw that generalization.
I think of a radical professor as one who is willing to consider
basic change in teaching. There are a lot of faculty people who
are radical in that sense. But on the whole, you are right, they
are pretty conservative, and don't change that much. Particularly
in the matter in the field of education, it is amazing how
traditional we are, how closely we follow the old line, the old
way of teaching. The old course format is still followed. The
most conservative position we have is about lectures, which
emerged in the Middle Ages when there weren't that many books
around. Now there are plenty of books and TV and computers.

Lage: Is there any more you would like to say in relation to the history
department or the university in general?

Brown: No, I don't think I need to say any more.

Lage: Okay. It may come up later because we are going to talk about
recruiting faculty. It does seem like the faculty you recruit
sets the curriculum.

The Vietnam Era, Brown's Role with the Asia Foundation

Lage: One thing we didn't get into when we talked about the turbulent
sixties, do you remember much about how the Vietnam War was
different from FSM or what the issues were?

Brown: With Vietnam, of course, the feelings of the students became much
more intense. The movement really heated up then. I don't recall
any details or incidents that I feel like I should go through.

Lage: Somewhere in your notes I ran across that you mentioned a letter
to President [Richard M.] Nixon on the Vietnam issue. Is that a
time to bring this up?

Brown: I talked with him once, and wrote a letter to him a decade or so
later. The talk was in 1953 when I was the Hong Kong
representative for the Asia Foundation, and when Nixon (then vice
president of the United States and chairman of the president's

163

Foreign Affairs Council) came to Hong Kong on his way back from a
visit to Southeast Asia.

When VIPs came to Hong Kong, it was customary for officers in
the American Consulate to plan just how that important person was
to be entertained and briefed. Before he or she arrived—Mrs.
Franklin Roosevelt was one who came through while we were in Hong
Kong, and whom we met in a reception line—usually the visitor
would be shown the schedule, which gives him or her a chance to
request changes. When Vice President Nixon saw the schedule, he
noticed that it provided for the usual briefings, receptions, and
dinners, plus a half -day cruise around Hong Kong on a luxurious
yacht. Nixon's response was surprising: he did not want to spend
his time cruising about in a yacht and requested, instead, that
arrangements be made for personal meetings with at least two
Chinese refugee intellectuals (distinguished Chinese intellectuals
who had fled from communist China and were then living in Hong
Kong) and with one American who had some in-depth understanding of
the Far East and was not an employee of the State Department.

So the yacht-cruise was canceled and meetings were arranged
with Chinese intellectuals. One that he talked with was a
distinguished historian (whose name I have forgotten) who was
helped by the Asia Foundation (while I was there) to start a
Chinese college that became, and still is, the most important
Chinese institution of higher learning in the British colony of
Hong Kong. Unlike the University of Hong Kong, it was a Chinese
university where Chinese scholars taught Chinese students in
Chinese.

The American Consulate selected me as the American who had
some in-depth knowledge of the Far East and who was not an
employee of the State Department. They told me that I was to meet
with the vice president at five p.m., and that our meeting would
follow meetings with two Chinese intellectuals and precede an
official dinner at six o'clock.

Although I am a Democrat who has never voted for Nixon in any
of his several bids for public office, I was pleased to be
selected for this meeting and was on hand at the appointed time.
But it was five-thirty before the vice president appeared. Having
been told that his dinner party was scheduled for six o'clock, I
was sure that the meeting would be quite short.

But it was at least an hour long, lasting well beyond the time
when he was supposed to be at the dinner party. I soon discovered
why he was running late: he was asking difficult questions that
had no simple answers. When I got home that night, I remember
telling Mary that I had faced more difficult questions than thos<

164

that were asked during my three-hour oral examination for the
Ph.D. at Stanford, about thirteen years earlier.

In this case I was not facing five professors who took turns
asking questions in their special fields of expertise, but facing
the vice president of the United States. Only the two of us were
in the room. There was no informal chit-chat. He began
immediately asking questions about the desirability and
possibility of opening up relations between the United States and
China. And I soon realized that questions arose from knowledge
and experience that he had obtained as chairman of the president's
security council (I forget its exact title) that included the
secretary of state and other cabinet officers with
responsibilities in foreign affairs. Most of the questions
revolved about whether, and if so how, the United States should
open up relations with communist China.

I was surprised to hear such questions from Nixon at that time
because, as you will recall, that was a time of widespread fear of
communism and Nixon had already become known for his anti-
communist stance. To my surprise, he was already convinced that
the reestablishment of trade with communist China would strengthen
the American economy. Since relations with communist China
actually were reestablished during Nixon's term as president, it
is clear that, as early as 1953, he was already thinking about
steps that he and Henry Kissinger later took to open up relations
with communist China.

I can remember pointing out that because of the authoritarian
character of the communist regime, moves in this direction would
have to be worked out with communist leaders themselves, and that
at every step of the negotiations careful attention would have to
be given to political and ideological questions, not just to
economic ones. The position and power of the overseas Chinese all
over Southeast Asia (not just in Taiwan) was also discussed. But
the most amazing aspect of that hour-long session with the vice
president, with only the two of us present, was that he was busily
taking notes on what I was saying. (Needless to say, no notes
were taken by the professors who asked questions during my Ph.D.
examination at Stanford in 1940.)

After the Hong Kong visit, the vice president spent a few days
in Tokyo and San Francisco on his way back to Washington, D.C.
While in San Francisco, he talked with my boss, the president of
the Asia Foundation, who later told me that Nixon had said
something like this: "You have a good man in Hong Kong but, since
he is a specialist on Japan, you have him in the wrong place."

165

Because the vice president had made such a remark to the
president of the Asia Foundation in San Francisco, I was
approached immediately about spending another year with the
foundation as its representative in Tokyo. Knowing that it was
university policy to permit no faculty member to take leave for
longer than one year, I had to say that I could not agree to spend
another year with the foundation unless that was agreeable to the
history department and the chancellor, who was then Clark Kerr. I
was in Hong Kong when the subject was brought up, and therefore do
not know precisely what was said and done. But I do know that the
president of the Asia Foundation made a request directly to
university officials, that Vice President Nixon's statement was
mentioned, and that it was claimed I was needed for important work
in Japan. Eventually I heard that a further extension of my leave
was granted, making my leave one of the longest, if not the
longest, ever granted to a professor at the University of
California. This meant that I would be on leave (without pay)
from the university for two and one-half years.

Before agreeing to extend the leave, Chancellor Kerr seems to
have consulted with the history department which agreed, but I
gather rather grudgingly not only because the leave was
excessively long, but apparently because my colleagues were not
among Nixon's most enthusiastic supporters. When I returned to
the university two and one half ears later, I remember Chancellor
Clark Kerr called me into his office and said, "Please don't ask
for another long leave." [laughter]

Lage: Did Nixon impress you?

Brown: Yes, and no. I was impressed by the energy and time that he was
devoting to the solution of very difficult and intricate problems
in foreign relations, explaining why he could and did (with the
help of many others such as Henry Kissinger) reestablish relations
with communist China. He had really studied the Far Eastern
situation and asked important questions. But I was still not
sufficiently impressed to vote for him as a candidate for the
presidency.

Lage: Why not?

Brown: For two reasons. First, he seemed to be a man who would do most

anything to gain and retain political power. Second, he seemed to
be intent on strengthening the economic and military power of this
country but not much interested in improving the life of ordinary
people.

Lage: And what about the letter that you wrote to President Nixon?

166

Brown: That was written toward the beginning of my second term as

chairman of the history department (probably in the autumn of
1971) after I had experienced the student movements in both
Berkeley and Tokyo. As I think I have said elsewhere, I was
director of the California Education Abroad Program between 1967
and 1969, when student unrest was rampant in Japan and when
opposition to the Vietnam War was spreading to students throughout
the industrialized world. Soon after returning from that two-year
stint, I was offered a summer appointment as a visiting professor
at the Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

The course I taught there was on the power of nationalism in
three Asian "revolutions": in Japan after 1868, in China after
1953, and then in Vietnam a decade or so later. A study of books
being written about the three suggested that a powerful ingredient
of each was an upsurge of nationalist feeling whipped by the real
and imagined military aggressiveness of outsiders. It was clear
that Japanese nationalism (later tabbed ultranationalism) was
aroused by the fear of aggressive action by Western powers, that
the communist revolution in China was intensified by feelings of
nationalism engendered by the Japanese military activities on
Chinese soil, and that the communist revolution in Vietnam was
gaining strength because of the presence of American troops within
Vietnam. In all three cases, outsiders enjoyed military
superiority but could not restrain revolutionary drives for
independence.

The British had also faced nationalist fervor for independence
but seemed to understand (after the success of the American
revolution) that such revolutions for independence could not be
restrained. So India and other parts of the British Empire were
given a high degree of independence without wars of independence.
But the Japanese and the Americans seem not to have learned that
lesson. Such thoughts about the power of nationalism stirred up
by aggressive military actions by neighbors (even distant ones)
led me to conclude that the fighting in Vietnam was strengthening,
not weakening, an independence movement that was being presented
to the American public as the threatening spread of communism.

And as prospects for victory in Vietnam became more and more
remote, and the student opposition stronger and stronger, I came
to the conclusion that (as in other cases, times, and places) this
was a war that the United States, as strong as we were militarily,
could not win. And I therefore took several days off to write a
long letter to President Nixon in which I first reminded him of
the talk we had had in Hong Kong, then went into my findings about
the power of nationalistic feelings (especially when foreign
troops were on native soil) , and recommended that we take the
position that we had ach.evid our military objectives and withdraw

167

American soldiers from Vietnam. Although I wrote several pages in
trying to make these points clear and convincing, I received no
answer. And I do not even have a copy of the letter I wrote.

Lage: Did you remind him of your meeting?

Brown: Oh, yes. I tried to be as diplomatic as possible, reminding him
of the conversation we had had in Hong Kong. I think I probably
indicated that it was because of him that I had been transferred
to Tokyo, and went on from there to say as best I could why it was
that we should get out of Vietnam. I tried to take the position
that we had won all that we had wanted, that we had won the war,
but that we should leave because we would never win against that
kind of opposition. It was becoming a disaster.

Lage : Were your views about Vietnam influenced by your study of Japan
and the Far East?

Brown: Yes. I had written a book on Nationalism in Japan (published in
1955) and had taught courses (first at Fort Collins and then at
Berkeley) in which I had compared the power of nationalism in
Japan with that in China and Vietnam. As a result of such study,
involving considerable reading of other studies being made at that
time, and long discussions with students and colleagues, I had
become convinced that the United States had become involved in a
bloody war that we could not win.

Since my letter was not answered, I do not know whether it was
received or, if so, how. Although the Nixon administration did
open up relations with China in 1972, and the U.S. did begin
withdrawing troops at about that time, I see no evidence that
Nixon ever seriously considered the cessation of bombing raids.
But when I was in Japan in 1976 (on a year of research) I went to
a reception given by the U.S. Embassy for Ambassador Ural Johnson
where I got the impression that the letter had been received,
possibly creating something of a stir.

To explain how and why 1 got this impression, I should sketch
my relationship with Ural. Back in 1935 and 1936 Ural and his
wife Pat spent their summers, as we did, at Lake Nojiri in the
Japanese Alps. Ural and I were then devoting several hours a day
to the study of Japanese. He was then a young foreign service
officer assigned to three years of full-time study on the
language. He and his wife Pat, who we were very fond of,
frequently joined us at bridge; and Ural and I also played tennis
together. So when Ural was serving as U.S. Ambassador to Japan in
the late 1960s, and I was director of the California Abroad

168

Program in Tokyo, Mary and I were invited to lunch at the U.S.
Embassy and saw them on several other occasions. After his term
as ambassador, he rose to the position of undersecretary for the
Far East, a position that he was probably holding when I sent off
my letter to President Nixon. The letter might well have been
forwarded to him as undersecretary for the Far East.

Anyway, when I met Ural at that reception in 1976, he
obviously remembered me but was cool to the point of being rude.
His coolness to me, coupled with the pro-war views toward Vietnam
that he had recently expressed in a speech delivered at the
International House of Japan, made me wonder if he had not read my
letter to Nixon and decided (if he had not already done so) that I
was one of those "soft-on-communism liberals" who was making it so
difficult for the president and his administration to push the
Vietnam War to a successful conclusion.

Lage: Did you tell me that your son had been involved in the anti-war
movement?

Brown: He was a conscientious objector. My son Ren's position about the
Vietnam War probably also influenced my thinking about that
operation. I admired him for his position. Ren spent two years
in a hospital doing alternate service as a conscientious objector.

Lage: Children do influence.

Brown: Yes.

Lage: Keep your thinking alive.

Brown: Can I bring in another incident about student opposition to the
Vietnam War?

Lage: Yes.

Brown: In response to a request made by an anti-war student group, our
church scheduled a meeting with them. They had decided that the
meeting should take the form of a series of discussions between an
anti-war student and a church parent. They had apparently assumed
that any parent from that hopelessly conservative church would be
in favor of the war and therefore a person whose thinking they
would have to change.

Well, I volunteered to be a parent in one of those discussion
sessions which were held, one after the other, in the presence of
the assembled crowd. But since I had been talking at length with
my son Ren about the war, and also teaching a id writing (and even
writing a letter to President Nixon) about the n.)-win situation in

169

Vietnam, what I said was not what the students had expected to
hear. Indeed they seemed anxious to bring my session to a close
promptly so they could move on to the expected type. A fellow
member of the church later said I was a good actor, leading me to
point out that I was not acting but talking as I had talked with
Ren.

Lage: [laughter] You were supposed to learn something from them.

Brown: Right.

Lage: Which church was that?

Brown: First Congregational Church in Berkeley.

Lage: The students did get very busy with organizing and educating.

Brown: Yes.

Brown's Second Chairmanship. 1972-1975 ##
Budgets, Class Size, Videotaping

Lage: Should we try to cover the history department in the seventies
during your chairmanship?

Brown: I might just draw some conclusions. It was still a period of
growth. The FTE situation was getting tighter.

Lage: So the budget was not as loose.

Brown: That's right.

Lage: Do the structural budgetary matters affect the curriculum?

Brown: Yes, indirectly and differently. I say indirectly because the

budget was not for a particular set of courses but for a definite
number of faculty appointments. That is, the budgetary unit was a
teaching slot that was and still is referred to as a full-time
teaching equivalent or FTE. Of course, the department's decision
to use an FTE for an appointment is based on the decision of the
department, which is officially made by the chairman but he makes
a decision only if it is approved by a majority of the associate
and full professors, the tenure committee. And that decision is
based on what courses we think should be offered. These might be

170

ones formerly taught but, for some reason or another, are no. now
being given. But they might also be new courses that we think
ought to added to the offerings of a history department attempting
to provide undergraduate and graduate instruction in all important
areas of history.

A review of the appointments made during the postwar years
will show that in years immediately following the Bouwsma
Revolution, when there was virtually no restriction on FTE,
several appointments were made in new fields of history.
Conversely, in later years (such as during my second term as
chairman) when the FTE were harder to get, appointments tended to
be limited to established areas of history where, because of
retirements or resignations, we felt that new appointments had to
be made. In early years, we even made two appointments in the
same new field if the second appointment was for a man or woman of
great scholarly promise. Although we probably made as many
appointments per year in later times of budgetary stringency,
these tended to be of the traditional sort: for teaching in areas
of history in which enrollments had always been quite high. The
earlier years were therefore more interesting. Then we could and
did make appointments in the history of science, as well as in the
history of India, Africa, and the Near East.

But by my second term in the 1970s, we were restricted by
budgetary tightness, and additional FTE had to be justified in
terms of student enrollments. Since the number of enrollments in
history had always been high, we were usually able to keep an FTE
that had been freed by a retirement or resignation. An actual
loss of FTE did not occur until after my second term. What
counted most thereafter was the number of student contact hours ,
the number of students that were taught during scheduled classes
in one week.

Lage: Not even the supervision of graduate research or--

Brown: No, not research, not advising, not class preparation, not public
lectures. Only hours of actually teaching in scheduled classes
multiplied by the number of students enrolled. It was of course
assumed that every teacher taught graduate courses as well as
undergraduate lecture courses—no professor was hired only for
lecturing in undergraduate courses, or only for seminar
instruction. It was also assumed that at least two hours a week
were devoted to advising. But budgetary calculations seem to have
been based mainly, if not exclusively, on the number of contact
hours .

171

Lage: Are all the orofessors as conscientious as you in attending to

seminars and advising within the constraints of the contact-hour
system?

Brown: Oh yes. Many were more conscientious than I was. For many, the

training of graduates for a career of teaching and research in our
special fields of history (what was done in graduate seminars) was
far more interesting than undergraduate lecturing, although
excitement about research tends to spread to lectures on related
topics. So I don't think that budgetary constraints had much of
an affect on our teaching. Whether we spent a lot of time on
small-class instruction or advising depended on what we felt
impelled to do, and not very much (or little at all) on how many
contact hours were being accumulated for budgetary purposes.

Lage: So the number of students enrolled in a professor's lecture course
did not matter that much?

Brown: Oh yes, it carried a lot of weight with budget officers.

Moreover, a professor usually took considerable pride in, and was
held in considerable esteem by his or her colleagues, for teaching
a lecture course year after year with an enrollment of two or
three hundred students. And a professor who taught a large
lecture course usually had ten or more students enrolled in his
graduate seminar. But it was also readily understood that the
largest classes were likely to be in the modern period of American
or European history, not in medieval or ancient periods of Chinese
or Near Eastern history. So professors of courses in modern U.S.
courses, especially if they satisfied the American institutions
requirement, were usually large. And the seminars of those
professors were also in great demand. So professors specializing
in the modern period tended to be quite busy with teaching, making
it difficult for them to find time for research or for taking on
such administrative chores as those born by a departmental
chairman.

Lage: Because the amount of money allocated, or the number of FTE
assigned to a department is based largely on the number of
students taught in approved courses during a given week, and large
lecture courses account for most of these contact hours, I can see
that the offering of proseminars for undergraduates would be
considered very costly.

Brown: True, although objections were not usually made in terms of money
but shortage of teachers. Of course to get more teachers, we had
to ask for more FTE. And everybody knew that it was difficult, if
not impossible, to get more FTE for a program that would decrease
the number of student-contact hours. It would be like asking for
more moaey because ycu don't need it. So I can not see how the

172

history department, or any other department in the humanities and
social sciences, can make the shift toward positive small-class
instruction without an entirely new way of evaluating what a
professor does. Instead of the present tendency to think, plan,
and budget in terms of the total number of students enrolled in
approved courses, we would have to adopt a formula that assigns
less weight to number and more to student.

Lage: How could you do that?

Brown: It would be very difficult, and probably impossible at a big

public institution like the University of California, but I think
it can be done and ought to be done if learning at the
undergraduate level is to be made challenging and exciting for
each exceptional student admitted to UC Berkeley for study in the
humanities and social sciences. It would be possible only if the
"number-of-contact-hours" principle is scrapped and replaced by
something like a "number-of-proseminar hours" principle.

If some such new principle were worked out and implemented, it
would probably have to be done by a committee or commission of
professors and students committed enough to the idea of positive
learning to devote much time, thought, and experimentation to
redefining standards for study load, teaching load, and course
format in ways that will deepen the urge of students to learn.

Lage: Once the new principle is defined, and the number of small classes
are increased, the number of large lecture courses will logically
be reduced.

Brown: Of course, introductory lecture courses will still be needed, but
the total number of hours devoted to lectures by most every member
of the department each term should be drastically reduced.
Special lectures on a professor's current research will also be
needed, for they are sure to stimulate students who are working on
projects in that particular area of history. In order to satisfy
these two types of need, while reducing the number of history
lectures offered during each week of a semester or quarter, we
probably should scrap the current tradition that every professor
will normally give one lecture course, and every student will
normally take two or three lecture courses, per term. Instead of
sticking to that old pattern, we should offer introductory lecture
courses needed for students who sign up for proseminars in a
particular area of history, plus the specialized lectures each
history professor wishes to give. If we stop thinking of a
lecture course as automatically involving three to five hours of
lecturing per week for an entire term, and think mainly of what
lectures a student needs, and a professor wants to give, we are
sure to have more teacher-time for small-class instruction.

173

Lage: Putting lectures on TV would also save teacher-time, wouldn't it?

Brown: Sure it will. But as the Sellers experiment (discussed above)
showed, we have to replace the "contact-hour" principle with
something like the "proseminar principle." Since a taped one-hour
lecture by a professor can not be properly counted as a contact
hour (especially if played for successive terms and years), the
use of tapes reduces a department's contact hours and weakens its
case for additional FTE.

As I have said, I was not here when the Sellers experiment
with TV tapes was dropped. I assume that the professors condemned
the experiment as a mechanized substitute for personal contact but
also claimed (and rightly so under the "contact hour" system) that
the lecture courses would be devalued, thereby undermining the
department's entitlement to a proper share of FTE.

Lage: Their jobs depend on it.

Brown: You might put it that way. Anyway the experiment was dropped.

Some months ago I was talking to Dr. Paul Leonard, formerly
president of San Francisco State University. He said that, while
he was at San Francisco State, he carried out a similar experiment
with students hearing a lecture on videotape. That too was
dropped because, he said, it was too much of a threat to the
faculty and to the lecture system on which undergraduate
instruction was based.

Lage: The physics department did something similar with their Physics 10
during the same era.

Brown: Oh, really? Did it collapse too?

Lage: I think it did. I don't know how long it lasted, but I hadn't
heard that explanation.

Brown: In this day and age, videotaping is something I think the

university ought to consider. It shouldn't replace the lectures
but be a way by which great lectures can be repeated and seen by
many at other times. A good lively lecture ought to be thought of
as a professor's report on his own research and findings, but when
his interests change, maybe that is when his old lecture should be
taped so that other students can use it and be stimulated by it,
rather than having it given over and over by the same man every
year even though his research interests have shifted.

Lage: I remember reading the Fybate notes for some lectures and sitting
in a lecture hall and hearing, word for wcrd, what had been said

174

in previous years. Well taken notes. Maybe the professor was
using the Fybate notes too.

Brown: Instead of Fybate notes, why couldn't we have a library of

videotapes for student assignments? A lecture should logically be
placed on videotape when a professor feels that the subject has
been fully developed and when he has become more interested in
working up lectures on some other issue. Taping would of course
eliminate the element of personal contact (although contact in a
class of 1000 is quite remote), it would free time for teaching
small courses and give students—at later times and in different
places—the opportunity to hear lectures developed by the lecturer
(or some other lecturer) and on subjects which he is currently
investigating.

Lage: Does it bother you that students, in signing up for undergraduate
proseminars, may not have the framework? Say they became
interested in a problem in Japanese history but had not had the
survey course to give them sufficent background to understand it.

Brown: Of course they should have a certain familiarity with the field in
which they want to take a proseminar in, but I would not favor the
flat requirement that a student signing up for a proseminar in
Japanese history be required first to take a particular survey
lecture course in Japanese history, especially if he or she has
elected to work on a problem for concentrated study. Indeed, it
is unlikely that he would have such an interest without some prior
knowledge or experience with life in Japan. He might have
obtained this knowledge or experience by having spent some time in
that country, by having taken courses on Japan in other
disciplines, or by having personally read a few good Japanese
novels or seen some gripping Japanese movies. Indeed the most
interesting undergraduate studies might very well be written by a
man or woman with a spotty introduction to Japan who builds his or
her framework while taking the proseminar. That could be done by
reading books that are needed to provide a wide-angle view of his
subject, or by simultaneously signing up for the survey lecture
course in that field.

Department Chairman's Role in Faculty Appointments

Lage: How much influence does the chairman have over who is hired?

Brown: Until after World War II when a chairman served for an indefinite
number of years, he (Professor Bolton) seems to have hired and
promoted professors pretty much as he pleased. But with the

175

practice of appointing a departmental chairman for a term of no
more than five years (after all members of the department have
been invited by the dean to express their preferences), the
influence of a chairman over appointments and promotions has been
greatly reduced. He still appoints selection or promotion
committees, still writes departmental recommendations for
appointments and promotions, and still contacts appointees about
actions being taken or considered.

A certain amount of influence is exerted in each of these
three activities, but only if the chairman does his homework, is
discriminating, and expresses himself convincingly. In selecting
professors for service on appointment and promotion committees, it
is always important for a chairman to pick individuals who are
sure to read critically and thoughtfully the writings of each
leading candidate and to recommend the appointment of the one with
the greatest distinction, not just the favored student of a member
of someone on the committee, or of a good friend at some other
university. In writing recommendations, the chairman of a great
department like ours should try to show, as convincingly as he or
she can, that the nominee is the most promising historian to be
found at any English-speaking university in the world. And when
talking to the candidate, an attempt should be made to supplement
information about rank and salary with affirmations of respect and
need for that scholar's presence on this campus.

I am reminded of hearing (while I was on leave in Japan) that
Professor Thomas Smith of Stanford had not responded to our offer
of an endowed chair, although considerable time had passed since
the offer was made. As soon as I heard about this in a letter
from Joseph Levenson, I got on the phone and called Tom from
Tokyo. My calling him from Japan (probably in the middle of the
night because of the eight-hour time differential) and insisting
that we needed him at Berkeley seems to have helped him make up
his mind. At any rate he soon decided to accept our offer,
becoming a continuing source of strength and prestige for the
history department.

Lage: Where is the influence on appointments? It sounds very diffuse.

Brown: The greatest influence is exerted by the three members of each
appointment committee, professors whose teaching and research
interests are in or near the field where the department has
decided an appointment should be made. Ideally and usually, the
committee's recommendation is based on a thorough study of the
writings and record of the leading candidates and of other
scholars in that field and at that rank. The committee's
recommendation is then reviewed by the tenure members of thn
department. After the Bouwsma revolution of 1957, tenure rrviws

176

became long and rigorous. So the departmental recommendation
later written by the chairman was and is essentially a boiled
down, and hopefully more punchy, version of what the selection
committee had recommended. Since this is done after the
recommendation has been subjected to a searching review by tenure
members of the department, the decision about who is to be hired
is not really made by the chairman but by professors whose
research and teaching interests are near those of the persons
being considered for appointment. Professors took, and still
take, these assignments seriously and do their homework well.

Lage: So you do not take credit for the remarkable growth of the
department during your two terms as chairman.

Brown: Not much. I have often taken the position that any new program or
development usually is, and should be, initiated by professors who
are actually teaching and carrying out research in the area of
program development, not by a chairman, dean, chancellor, or
president. The validity of this view was underscored for me when
my colleague Professor Martin Malia came into my office one day to
complain that course offerings at Berkeley in his field of Slavic
studies were much weaker than at Harvard. After hearing him out,
I suggested that he do something about it. He was obviously
surprised by my suggestion, apparently assuming that there was
nothing he could do but complain to the chairman.

So he asked what in the world he could do? Which led me to
recommend that he consult with two or three of the most
distinguished Slavic professors at Berkeley, decide just which
distinguished Slavic scholar should be added to our faculty, and
then go together to the chancellor and ask that an FTE be made
available for such an appointment. Martin was taken aback by the
idea. But he did get his colleagues together, and they decided
just who should be added to the Berkeley faculty. Then they asked
for an appointment with the chancellor and went in to his office
to explain how the weakness of the Slavic program at Berkeley
could be removed. Immediately after that meeting, Martin came in
to tell me that they had got what they wanted: that the chancellor
had decided, while they were in his office, that an FTE would be
assigned for such a new appointment in Slavic studies.

I was inclined to think then, and still do, that any new
program is more likely to be implemented if it is initiated by
professors who are actually teaching and carrying on research in
that particular field. If it is initiated, on the other hand, by
an administrator (chancellor, dean, or chairman), it is sure to
fail if the professors in the new program are not enthusiastic
supporters of the program. But when initiated by the professors
t. .em •.elves, support is assured from the start.

177

Lage: Would that be true also of a new emphasis on proseminars for
undergraduate majors in history?

Brown: I think so, especially at a large university like ours.

Conceivably, a dean who had experienced outbursts of student
enthusiasm for learning when investigating problems of their own
choosing in seminar-type courses might convince some members of
his faculty to experiment with this kind of teaching. But at a
place like Berkeley such an approach at the undergraduate level is
not likely to be seriously considered until a group of professors
become sufficiently enthusiastic about it to do the planning and
to devote time and energy to experimentation. Then if they can
show, clearly and definitely, that a large percentage of the
mediocre students enrolled in such research suddenly developed a
great thirst for learning, maybe they should be able to convince
the dean of Letters and Science that all undergraduate major
programs in L&S should be focused on instruction of this type.

But that is not likely to happen at Berkeley where most
professors are so immersed in their own research that they do not
have the urge to get involved in stimulating undergraduate
interest in learning by investigating his or her own relevant and
exciting historical problem. My guess is that undergraduate
instruction will gradually move in this direction but that the
lead will be taken at small colleges where more attention is given
to teaching than to research.

Affirmative Action and Proposed Changes to the Tenure
Committee

Lage: Did the hiring processes change between these two periods? I keep
thinking about affirmative action, which became an issue about '73
when HEW [Department of Health, Education, and Welfare]
investigated the campus.

Brown: Yes, I know. We felt there was not so much of a problem in

history because we had employed women already. Furthermore, we
weren't worrying about government contracts—we didn't have such
contracts in history. We approved the idea of hiring more blacks
and women, but we insisted that scholarship was the main factor,
not gender or race . I think the department has held to that line
pretty well.

Lage: It seems, though, that some departments, maybe all departments,
have cast a broader net as they are looking for candidates than
they used to. Was that something you were aware of?

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Brown: A change did take place in the 1970s, at the time of my second

term as chairman. But I don't think that casting a broader net is
the right way to describe the change. Instead, I think we would
prefer to say that while the net was cast just as widely in the
1960s, affirmative actions laws and regulations now required us to
publicize all openings. So that any person of either gender or
any race, who felt that he or she was qualified, might apply. So
although our net was cast as widely as before, many more fish
appeared in the net. The record will show that more whites and
blacks were added to the staff but I do not think any appointed
historian was brought to our attention solely by that individual's
personally submitting an application. Usually, if not always,
that individual had come to our attention through his or her own
publications or by way of a fellow historian at another
university. And yet more women and blacks were appointed after
the 1970s, and so we were undoubtedly influenced, consciously or
unconsciously, by the new emphasis upon finding and employing
qualified historians who were not white men.

Lage: When did this change come? Was that a university requirement?

Brown: I think that we began to publicize all vacancies by the time of my
second term.

Lage: So you would get a larger pool?

Brown: We had many applicants for every new position.

Lage: Before that, had it been mainly calling Harvard or--

Brown: The main approach earlier was contacting the most distinguished
scholars in that particular field and getting them to write and
make suggestions. Not simply getting them to name names, but to
give us their impressions and their thoughts as a result of
reading what had been written by scholars in the field. We asked:
"Who is turning out the best studies, and who is the real comer in
your field?" We would ask a number of people and get them to
think not simply about their own students but about all those who
were coming up with new ideas and theories .

Lage: When you were chair of the department the second time, was there
any new set of young Turks in the department that were working in
a particular direction?

Brown: The only young Turk movement that I remember, and I think this

came in my second term, was when our assistant professors came to
feel that they should be included in tenure committee (associate
and full professors) meetings when new appointments were being
considered. Since mos ; o'f the assistant professors were producing

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distinguished studies and were confident of reaching tenure, and
felt that they would be associated with any new appointee as long
or longer than any member of the tenure committee, they rightly
felt that they should have something to say about each new
appointment. Most associate and full professors felt, however,
that permitting every assistant professor to participate in the
consideration of all new appointments might put one or more
individuals in the position of consciously or unconsciously
opposing an appointment because it might weaken his own chances of
promotion to tenure. In other words, a conflict of interest might
cause assistant professors to oppose an appointment that would be
best for the department.

I and several other tenure members of the department sided
with the young Turks on this issue, feeling that we could spot,
and deal with, cases in which there was a conflict of interest.
But most senior members of the department felt rather strongly
that this might be a very disruptive change to make. After long
discussions of this issue at a meeting of all members of the
department, it was put to a vote. And when the votes were
counted, the number of those favoring the inclusion of assistant
professors in meetings devoted to the consideration of a new
appointment was precisely the number of those who were in
opposition. That meant that it was up to me, as chairman, to cast
the deciding vote.

This put me in a bind. I really was in favor of the change
but also realized that senior members of the department were
convinced that it was a bad move. So I announced that I wanted
some time to think this out and would let them know, in writing,
within a few days. After mulling it over for several hours, I
wrote a letter in which I explained that I was making a
distinction between my vote as an individual member of the
department and my vote as chairman. As an individual, I was in
favor of including assistant professors in all tenure committee
meetings, but as chairman I had reached the conclusion that a
change in the composition of the tenure committee (our most
important committee) should be made only when favored by at least
two-thirds of the department. To do otherwise might induce
destructive tension and conflict. So I, as chairman, voted
against the change.

Lage: That was carefully thought out.

Brown: I know that David Keightley, who is a professor of Chinese studies
now and has gotten all kinds of honors and awards, was a key young
Turk at the time. He was a little unhappy at my decision. But he
has recently become chairman. I have not yet asked him what his
position on that issue is at present.

180

Lage: When you took that position, was it to avoid controversy, or did
you really feel strongly about it?

Brown: No, I felt this change would have been disruptive, that there
would have been too many unhappy senior professors about this
arrangement. It seemed to me that it was good for the department
not to make such a drastic change without more support from more
people.

Lage: When you are talking to ex-Chancellor Bowker at church, you can
quote something he said in his oral history to him. It is just
being finished, his oral history. He said that history, English,
and sociology were very academically conservative and male-
oriented departments, but they began to appoint women in the
seventies. How would you react to that?

Brown: We were academically conservative, all right. And what else?
Lage: And male-oriented.

Brown: I think probably that is true. I think the female members of the
history department today would say it still is male-oriented.
Maybe the males themselves would say that. They were certainly in
the majority.

Lage: Do you think that affected the way people looked at new
candidates? Is that what male-oriented means?

Brown: It is male-oriented in that the department is dominated by men.
That does not mean, and I don't think Bowker means, that we were
opposed to the appointment of highly qualified female professors
of history. We never took that position. I think most members of
the department would say that we always have been and still are in
favor of appointing women who are outstanding historians. I don't
think, however, that there has ever been any feeling that we
should not hire a woman simply because she was a woman. We have
never felt, as far as I know, that we should not hire somebody
because she was a woman. If she doesn't measure up, if she's
appointed only to increase our quota of women faculty members, I
don't think anybody would have favored appointment. Maybe some
women would take this position, but I don't think so.

Lage: Maybe this came after your time, or maybe it never occurred, but
was there any administrative pressure to make the faculty more
diverse, either by hiring more women or minorities?

Brown: I don't remember any orders. I don't think we ever got to the

point of saying, "This FTE must be filled b/ a woman." There were
various kinds of announcements from the U.S. government and the

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president's office advocating and urging that we do more to
increase the number of women on the faculty. I think our response
consistently was: Yes, we will certainly hire a woman, ij? she is
the most qualified person in the field for which we wish to make
an appointment.

Confidentiality in Hiring Recommendations

Lage: Another thing Bowker brings up, and maybe this was after your

chairmanship, but during his chancellorship there was a lawsuit to
make the history department give up its faculty hiring files.
They subpoenaed the faculty hiring paperwork of the history
department. The history department refused to give it up. Do you
recall that at all?

Brown: I was not chairman at that time, but I heard about it. Clearly

this was requiring the department to disclose letters that we were
under an obligation to treat as confidential. It had become a
tradition that letters of recommendation and evaluation for new
appointments (and also for promotions to tenure) should be kept
confidential because we wanted to know what another historian in
the same field really thought about the value, originality, and
quality of the candidate's writings. We were sure that we would
not get frank and honest evaluations in letters that the candidate
was free to read. So the department logically objected to
producing letters that we had obtained with the expressed or
understood promise of confidentiality.

But laws and the courts came down on the side of openness.
Which meant that we had to find other ways of obtaining frank and
honest appraisals. And so gradually the department had to resort
to a more extensive use of the telephone.

Lage: Which is completely undocumented.

Brown: Yes. A situation was arising in which people wouldn't write what
they really thought.

Lage: So you had to follow up the letters with phone calls?

Brown: Yes, or talk to people at meetings. This is probably true today.
It affects all recommendations, those for scholarships as well as
those for promotion and appointment . Now a student is asked to
indicate, on the recommendation form, whether or not he or she
waives the right to read this recommendation. I am inclined to

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think that students who waive the right do so because they realize
that an open recommendation is probably not going to mean much.

Lage: Do the better students waive that right?

Brown: I have not made a study of this, but I have a hunch that that may
be true. The better students may realize that the recommendation
is not going to mean that much if they exercise their right to
read it. Moreover, they may also realize that the recommendation
is going to be full of high praise anyway, and assume that the
praise will carry more weight if is not read by the person
recommended .

Faculty Teaching Loads

Lage: Over the years that you were with the department, were faculty
teaching loads reduced at any particular time?

Brown: I think I may have had something to do with that. When I was

first appointed chairman, three courses at a time was the normal
load. I started reducing the course load for heavy administrative
assignments such as for vice chairman and the chairmen of key
committees. Gradually two courses became the standard load.

Lage: The standard regardless-
Brown: It seems that way. I haven't really checked.

Lage: That was just on a departmental basis, it wasn't a campuswide
decision?

Brown: I don't know that there was ever a campus-wide ruling on it. It

just sort of gravitated in that direction. This is a big problem,
and a tricky one. Some teachers spend an awful lot of time
teaching with a low course load. The number of hours of teaching,
the number of classes you teach, is really not a very clear
indication of the amount of time given to teaching, especially if
teachers give a lot of time to talking with individual students ,
which is not considered a part of the teaching load.

Lage: Or developing a new course.

Brown: Yes, I remember dealing with the dean and his budgetary officer

about the number of FTE the department might obtain the following
year, and hearing the budgetary officer make calculations in terns
of the number of "contact hours" in history—that is, the numbei

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of students enrolled in history courses times the number of units
of credit obtained. (It was of course assumed that one credit
hour meant one "contact hour" per week in a given term. ) Since
our department had an unusually large number of classes with big
enrollments, we had a good "contact hour" record and were
therefore entitled, at that time, to about as many FTE as we
wanted. Whether the teaching was good or bad was not taken into
account. And small classes were expensive in that they did not
add much to the number of history "contact hours."

Lage: Very deceptive statistics.

More on Curriculum

Lage: When you look at the course catalogue now, the history courses are
very different from those that were offered in the fifties, say.
More social history, more ethnic history, women's history, all
kinds of specialization.

Brown: I don't think this is the result of a history department change of
policy, or even maybe a change in the history department
chairman's position. I have a feeling that it's primarily a
result of change in the views and interests of individual
professors. Every change arises mainly, if not exclusively, from
the wishes of each individual professor.

Lage: They're not debates about what direction should the curriculum
take?

Brown: I don't think that is an issue that comes up departmentally, but

it may. I am not even sure that the chairman takes an active role
in these new directions, but he may.

Lage: Even in your time, there were changes. When you came, there was a
lot of political and diplomatic history.

Brown: Yes. Those changes, I think, were largely changes that were made
because individual faculty members wanted change.

Lage: Are they responding to trends in the profession, or what are they
responding to?

Brown: There are lots of influences on them. They change because of what
they read, and vhat they hear from their colleagues, and what they

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hear from the students, and what they read in the newspaper.
There are complex influences on them. They probably themselves
are not in a very good position to say why they have taken a
particular position, why they have changed the structure of their
course and so on. But I am sure definite changes have taken place
and that the influences have been complex.

Lage: They don't all come out of a committee meeting. That's
gratifying.

Brown: I don't remember this being a subject of committee meetings, but
maybe that has happened since my day.

[tape interruption]
Lage: You had a follow-up thought here.

Brown: This business of changing of courses is related to the idea of

reforming education as a whole. It is not a dean or an official
that makes the difference. Not even committee meetings,
departmental meetings, and so on. What matters is the interest of
the individual professor. From the interest of an individual
professor comes the drive for reform and change, not from higher
up on the academic ladder. Only if a group of individuals (such
as the young Turks of the 1950s) take the same position do you
build up a force for change.

Lage: Okay.

Regional History and Changes in the Discipline

Lage: 1 wanted to ask you one thing else that goes back into our

previous interviews that was brought up by the Bancroft Library
meeting yesterday, in the Arthur Quinn lecture. It has also been
raised at other times, but Arthur Quinn commented on Gene
Brucker's faculty lecture about the history of the history
department. As he sees it, another side effect of this interest
of the history department in raising its level and becoming world
class, shall we say, was a diminishment of California history and
history of the West as being kind of provincial, and of interest
in the Bancroft Library as well. Would you have any comment on
that?

Brown: I can see that Mr. Quinn might detect some diminishment of

California history and history of the West in years that followed
what I have been calling the Bouwsma revolution. But I do not

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think the diminishment was all that clear or substantial, or that
it resulted from a definite departmental position. Of course,
leaders of the revolution (May, Stampp, and Bridenbaugh) were
professors of American history and did not share the position of
Professor Bolton and his students who felt that U.S. history
should be seen and taught in the context of American history as a
whole. But that did not mean that they objected to historical
study and research in such fields as California, the West, and
even Latin America. Appointments were made in western and Latin
American history after the revolution. If fewer appointments were
made in those areas, it was not because—we would all insist—
fewer historians of distinction were available for appointment in
those areas. As I think I noted above, we were not much
restricted by a limitation of FTE (especially in my first term)
and we were not that much preoccupied with what fields of history
should be taught.

The main questions was: Who is developing new and exciting
studies of history? Of course the revolution was in a sense a
continuation of the two-stage revolt, first against chairman being
appointed for life (as Professor Bolton was), and secondly against
a departmental majority (including Bolton students) that seemed
not to be very discriminating in recommending appointments.

Lage: Chairman for life?

Brown: Yes, the chairman-for-life tradition. That made the chairman very
powerful. He had an awful lot to say about appointments and
promotions and everything else that happened within the
department. That tradition had been pretty much dropped by the
time that I arrived at Berkeley. Professor Paxson was chairman
when I arrived, and Professor Hicks shortly after that. Hicks
was, I think, followed by Professor King. We had a succession of
chairmen. Not for life, but just for three or four years.

Lage: So Bolton really put his stamp on the department, and he had a
specific historical emphasis.

Brown: Yes. The thing that he was most interested in was the history of
the Americas. He felt that just history of the United States
without considering the history of the other parts of the Americas
--Canada, South America, and Latin America—just didn't make any
sense. So he instituted courses in the history of the Americas,
and that was a required course at the lower-division level. That
kind of interest meant that many of the appointments were in that
field, and other fields were not given appropriate attention, I
guess is what most of the "revolutionaries" would have said.

186

When his term ended, a shift went in the other direction.
Then more attention was given to other fields of history. It was
then that I came in as a professor of Japanese history. Chinese
history and various other fields were represented. In that
process, the history of the Americas program was downplayed, and
the history of the United States became stronger. We continued to
teach a Latin American history, but I think it is fair to say that
less attention was given to appointments in the Bolton tradition.
Nevertheless, we still offered courses in Latin American and
Western history. I remember the appointment of Professor
[Gunther] Earth in Western history, and Professor [Walton] Bean
still taught a popular course in California history.

Lage: Lawrence Kinnaird?

Brown: Yes, Lawrence was one of the several students of Professor Bolton.
Others were Professors James King and Engel Sluiter.

Lage: In the historical profession as a whole, was there less of an

interest in regional history? Regional history seems to be making
a revival right now.

Brown: That is probably so, although it has always seemed pretty strong.

There was a lot of interest in that field all during the years that I
was in the department. One of our professors, Professor George
Hammond, was director of Bancroft for several years. Later Professor
Hunter Dupree of the history department was acting director. So the
history department was consistently connected with the Bancroft
Library. Later on, Professor James D. Hart was director and from the
English department. But he was respected by historians. We all
still feel that the Bancroft Library is important.

Lage: I am glad we covered that.

187

VI THE ACADEMIC SENATE, BERKELEY AND STATEWIDE

The Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations at Berkeley
Role and Selection of the Committee

Lage: I want to take a look at the Academic Senate a little more

specifically, maybe starting with the Committee on Budget and
Interdepartmental Relations, the famous Budget Committee. I know
it is very powerful, and I would like you to give a description of
how it works and how you see it in terms of its power.

Brown: Its history is long and interesting. It emerged first in 1923, I

am told, with a faculty revolution against the president. I am not
sure why they were discontented with him at that particular time,
but as a result of the revolt, the so-called Budget Committee was
set up and the president agreed that he would make no faculty
appointment or promotion until he had received and considered a
recommendation from the faculty Budget Committee.

Such recommendations continue to be made to chancellors by
budget committees on each campus, as well as to the president by a
statewide budget committee. Although these committees are housed
and administered somewhat differently on the various campuses, the
basic function remains the same: to make recommendations on faculty
appointments and promotions that are then considered by a
chancellor or president before final decisions are made.

The statewide committee does not deal directly with
appointments and promotions but with policies and issues about what
can and should be done to attract distinguished scholars to our
faculty and to keep them here after they have been hired. For
example, when I chaired the statewide Budget Committee in 1965-66,
I remember that we made recommendations to the president on two
important personnel questions. In both cases our recommendations
were accepted by che president. The first, question was how the

188

university should use several million dollars that had been set
aside by the state for merit increases the following year. The
simple and easy answer was to divide up the money according to
rank, giving the most senior professors the largest increases. But
after a long and detailed study of the faculty salary situation
throughout the country, we decided that a larger percent of the
increase should be awarded to junior faculty members.

The second question (which we discussed earlier) was whether
the university should drop the practice of requiring that every
professor be considered for advancement after a prescribed number
of years at each step of his or her rank. As noted above, we
recommended that the requirement not be dropped. And it was not.

The five members of the Berkeley Campus Budget Committee (now
seven) are always appointed by the Committee on Committees, the
members of which are elected by faculty members holding the rank of
assistant professor or higher, referred to as the Academic Senate.
It was customary, and I hope it still is, for the Committee on
Committees to make their selections from a list of persons
submitted by the Budget Committee.

Lage: That does not sound very democratic.

Brown: It wasn't, but I am inclined to think that in this case a more

democratic process of selection would not be in the best interests
of the university. In my year as chairman of the Berkeley Budget
Committee, the Committee on Committees decided to recommend one or
two persons not recommended by us. And I met with that committee
to explain why we thought they were making a mistake.

The Appointment and Promotion Process

Brown: Before I get into that, I should say something about the extent to
which our recommendations were accepted, and how this strengthened
the reputation of Berkeley as a university where the faculty played
a decisive role in appointments and promotions. During the three
years I was on the Budget Committee, in probably only a dozen or so
cases did the chancellor (or the vice chancellor of academic
affairs) refuse to accept what the Budget Committee had
recommended. There was no case in which he decided to appoint a
person not recommended by the Budget Committee, or rejected a
recommended promotion. When the chancellor's decision was not
precisely as recommended, the difference was always over the salary
to be paid an appointee or the timing of a promotion. The
chancellor consistently came down on the side, of genero;itr. He

189

invariably took the position (usually in a neeting with us) that
"this is the salary I think we must offer to get so-and-so", or "I
think we have to promote so-and-so now to keep him or her from
going elsewhere." And we never objected to decisions made on such
grounds because we shared his desire to get and hold distinguished
members of the faculty. Moreover, the chancellor often based his
position on knowledge gained from a personal conversation with the
individual being appointed or promoted.

Although all appointments, and almost all promotions, were
based on recommendations made by the faculty (not by the president
or chancellor), it should be pointed out that those recommendations
were made only at the final stage of a rather long and rigorous
review process which began with a departmental decision made by the
chairman, in consultation with other professors of the department,
to recommend a new appointment in a particular field. Then the
chairman appointed a search committee that assumed the
responsibility for publicizing the opening, studying the
candidates' writings and recommendations, and recommending the
appointment of the most distinguished candidate. That committee
was and is always made up of at least three professors whose
teaching and research are in or near the field in which the
proposed appointment is to be made.

So this was and still is a key point in the recommendation
process. The chairman appoints a selection committee made up of
professors who know the field in which the proposed appointment is
to be made, and who are sure to make their selection on the basis
of a rigorous and discriminating study. That study is then written
up and circulated to all members of the tenure committee (or
department) before a scheduled meeting at which the report is
subjected to a critical review. Only after that review has been
made does the chairman write a departmental recommendation based on
what the selection committee has proposed and what other members of
the department have said or written at the time of the review.

Supported by copies of the candidate's writings as well as by
recommendations written by respected scholars in the field, the
chairman's recommendation is then sent to the dean. The dean may
have his own say about the case before sending it on to the Budget
Committee. Then the one member of the Budget Committee responsible
for recommendations in that particular area suggests the names of
at least three professors (one from the department making the
recommendation and two from related fields in other departments) to
be appointed to a confidential review committee. His suggestions
are then proposed at a Budget Committee meeting where the final
decision is made as to who should serve on that special review
committee.

190

Lage: Then what?

Brown: Then the whole file (everything submitted by the departmental

chairman and comments that might have been added by the dean) is
sent to the chancellor's office where a secretary familiar with
established procedures arranges to have the committee formally
appointed by the chancellor. She also arranges meetings of the
committee and familiarizes it with rules of confidentiality and the
requirement of a written report (drafted by a chairman selected by
the committee) based on a rigorous and independent review. After
the committee's report is drawn up (after an extensive reading and
discussion of the evidence) and approved, the entire file, plus the
report of the special committee, is sent back to the Budget
Committee for its final review and recommendation.

Lage: So there is a lot of study by specialists at three different levels
before the Budget Committee makes its recommendation?

Brown: Yes, anyone who has had experience at all levels of the

recommendation process is sure to say that while the initial study
and recommendation by the departmental selection committee is
crucially important, the confidential recommendation of the special
review committee (members of which are selected by the Budget
Committee but appointed by the chancellor) is critically decisive.

The Value of Confidentiality and Courage

Lage: What do you mean when you say that the recommendation of that
special committee is confidential?

Brown: In the first place no one outside the Budget Committee and the

chancellor, and their secretaries, are told who has been appointed
to that committee. In the second place, its report is seen only by
the chancellor and members of the Budget Committee. Furthermore,
the Budget Committee recommendation is a confidential document read
only by the chancellor or vice chancellor who makes the final
decision.

Lage: In this day of more and more openness, is all that secrecy
necessary?

Brown: As is true of student evaluations, it is difficult if not

impossible to obtain a frank and honest evaluation of a professor's
achievements in teaching, research, and public service (the three
established criteria for appointment and promotion) if it is known
that the candidate will be able to read his own personnel file, flo

191

one wants to be really honest, especially in writing, about the
achievements of a friend, colleague, or professor who teaches and
carries on research in the same department. And if we receive only
assessments that the candidate may read, we are without good
evidence for deciding which candidate is the most qualified person
for appointment or promotion. Oral reports are not very useful in
the recommendation process unless they are written down, and they
are virtually useless if the evaluator realizes that what he is
saying will be read by the candidate. Honest evaluations by
colleagues are hard to get, even when all personnel documents are
kept confidential. Berkeley professors seem to realize, however,
the importance of confidentiality and do not object to it.

Certainly I did not object when the dean asked my secretary to
take my personnel file to him so that he could keep it in his
office during the years that I was chairman. So I have never seen
the confidential letters that were written about me when I was
first appointed or when I was later promoted to tenure.

Questions about what is in the file are raised only when a
junior professor is not given tenure.

Just this morning (June 1, 1997), I was reading in the San
Francisco Chronicle about an assistant professor at Stanford who
was denied tenure and was claiming that the dean did not appreciate
the kind of research he was doing. Stanford must have a
recommendation process somewhat like the one we have at Berkeley,
which means that the person's failure to obtain tenure probably was
based on a thorough study of confidential assessments made by
distinguished scholars in related fields of study, and that the
assessments were subjected to several levels of review in terms of
clearly-defined criteria for promotion. But confidential
assessments and reviews can not be revealed. So that puts the dean
on the spot: he will be condemned and attacked in the mass media,
and maybe in court, for a decision based on assessments that he can
not reveal.

We had a case like that when I was in my first term as
chairman and when a young assistant professor, a popular teacher,
was not promoted to tenure. Articles in the Daily Cal claimed that
the department was not interested in good teaching and that this
was another case of a good teacher "perishing" because he had not
published enough. When a reporter for the Daily Cal came to me for
an interview, I said I would write out a statement for him but did
want merely to answer questions orally. I had already gotten into
trouble with General MacArthur, as you recall, because of press
releases based on an oral interview.

192

One surprising result of my statement in the Daily Cal was
that a professor in another department wrote to compliment me and
to say that he had learned for the first time about Berkeley's
recommendation process. My guess is that he had not yet been asked
to serve on a review committee. His letter indicated that not only
the students and the general public but professors at the lower
rungs of the academic ladder were not fully aware of the existence
and value of our confidential review system.

Lage: But don't you think the move toward openness will continue?

Brown: Yes. And this probably means that frank confidential letters of
appraisal will no longer be written or requested. I have long
thought openness would lead to the appointment and promotion of
second-rate scholars: that this would surely lead to a drift toward
academic mediocrity. But now I am not so sure. So long as we
retain our review process with its confidential in-house
assessments, appointments and promotions might well continue to be
awarded only to first-rate teachers and scholars. But this will
happen only if reviewers at each stage of the recommendation
process really do their homework: see and hear the candidate in
teaching situations, read and study the results of his or her
research, and write a discriminating assessment in terms of the
three established criteria for appointment and promotions
(teaching, research, and public service). Requests for "frank
appraisals" from professors at other institutions often do tempt
them to vent irritation over some real or imagined slight and to
make comments, made under the cloak of confidentiality, that have
only a tangential bearing on the quality of the candidate's
teaching and research.

So maybe we should stop asking for assessments that a
candidate will not be allowed to read. And maybe we should tell
members of a special review committee appointed to consider a case
of promotion to tenure that if they recommend against tenure, the
veil of confidentiality may be lifted: that their report (including
the names of those who signed it) may be read by the candidate if
he or his lawyer makes such a request. Negative recommendations
might then be worded differently but still be negative: they would
be less likely to condemn the candidate as a lousy teacher whose
publications are rubbish, and more likely to demonstrate that the
university can easily find a man or woman in that field who has far
greater academic promise. But such openness leaves this troubling
question: Will members of the review committees have the courage
(nerve) to rationally and thoughtfully recommend that a friend and
colleague be deprived of tenure? I submit that such courage or
nerve is needed, over and over and at numerous points in the
university's educational process. And if it is not exercised

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constantly and by many, the quality of teaching and research at the
university is sure to decline.

Lage: Do you remember cases in which the lack of such courage seemed
detrimental?

Brown: Oh yes. Such cases are hard to forget because it is at such times
that each professor has to ask himself such questions as these: Can
I and should I be tough-minded at the cost of losing a friend? Can
I be academically discriminating and a considerate colleague at the
same time? How can I be party to kicking out of the university a
person with whom I enjoy discussing historical issues and playing
golf? Every time an assistant professor is considered for
promotion to tenure, we are all forced to do some soul-searching
that can be quite painful. So we tend to remember these cases
quite well, even recalling emotional exchanges that we would prefer
to forget. So I have no wish to run through either the cases in
which we recommended against tenure or in which tenure was granted
in the face of considerable opposition. That would not do me, or
others, any good.

But there was an incident pertaining to the allocation of
research funds that I feel impelled to air. This came when the
department's scholarship committee announced its intention to
divide all available scholarship funds equally among those
requesting financial assistance. I was appalled. I remember
asking: Do you mean to award a senior professor, who apparently
intends to spend most of his time abroad sight-seeing, an amount of
money equal to that for an assistant professor who may be on the
verge of turning out a really exciting book on an important
historical problem? In response to such questions, a member of the
committee said something like this: Who are we to judge whether one
colleague's research is more worthy than that of another?

At the end of the ensuing discussion, the department agreed
that the funds should be awarded on the basis of merit, not divided
equally. But the dilemma we constantly face was openly confronted
and dealt with. We came to realize, once more, that in order to
function effectively and creatively as tax-supported teachers, we
had to make judgments about each other that we customarily make
when deciding to approve a graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation or
to decide whether to give an undergraduate a course-grade of C or
B. At the university as well as at church, we have to learn just
how, or whether, judgment can be linked with compassion.

Lage: And why do you say that the confidential recommendation of the
special review committee is critically decisive?

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Brown: Because my years on the Budget Committee lead me to conclude that
this committee seldom, if ever, rejects a departmental
recommendation that is not first rejected by the review committee.
Although the membership of the review committee, as well its
report, are confidential, my experience at different stages of the
recommendation process makes me quite sure that at the time of the
Bouwsma revolution (when the chancellor and the president decided
to offer a tenure appointment to Professor Bouwsma even though an
overwhelming majority of the department had recommended someone
else), the administration and the Budget Committee came down on the
side of the young Turks only after and because the young Turk
position had been endorsed by the special review committee. To
this day, I do not know who was on that committee or what was said
in its report. And I doubt if anyone else knows or remembers, or
can gain access to the record of what was written and said at that
stage of the review. But I still say that recommendations made at
that stage were, and probably still are, critically decisive.

Lage: So what happens after the report of the special committee comes
back to the Budget Committee?

Brown: The entire case is again studied by the member of the committee
responsible for handling recommendations submitted by that
particular department. After reading over and studying the entire
record, he drafts a recommendation that is then considered, and
often revised, by the committee as a whole. Then the final
recommendation is sent to the chancellor or academic vice
chancellor for decision and implementation.

Lage: I can see that the Budget Committee was the organ through which the
faculty exercised its right (gained in 1923) to recommend
appointments and promotions before a decision was made by the
president or chancellor. You must have been pretty busy.

Brown: Yes, we were busy, and everybody seems to have realized that we had
an important job that took a lot of time. Consequently, anyone
appointed to it was usually permitted to reduce his teaching load
by half, and excused from serving on other committees. We had our
own office with a secretarial staff and extensive personnel files.
Only members of the committee and our secretaries could enter that
room, and only we possessed keys to it. It was not unusual for one
or more members of the committee to be at his desk until late at
night, as well as on holidays and over weekends.

Lage: Since the Budget Committee stood at the top of the process by which
all faculty appointments and promotions were recommended, were you
frequently asked for information about individual cases, or asked
to give someone special consideration?

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Brown: Although most everyone knew who was on the Budget Committee- -we
were selected by the elected Committee on Committees, and our
appointments were reported in the minutes of the Academic Senate--
during my three years on the Budget Committee no one ever asked me
about a particular case or tried to influence me for or against an
appointment or promotion. With one notable exception. One day a
professor complained to me that he had not received an accelerated
merit increase. But he seemed to be blaming his colleagues, not me
or the Budget Committee. Anyway even he seemed to feel that he was
getting out of line, and the committee did not reconsider his case.

Lage: How were members of that committee selected and appointed?

Brown: By the Committee on Committees, members of which were elected by

the Academic Senate (made up of professors at all ranks). But the
Committee on Committee made its appointments from a list
recommended by the Budget Committee.

Lage: Earlier on, you started to explain why this seemingly undemocratic
procedure was justified.

Brown: I thought, and still think, it is justified because senior scholars
are more likely to be sufficiently wise and courageous to make
tough decisions about whether a department's recommendation should
be approved or rejected, especially when the recommendation is for
an appointment of a distinguished scholar at a salary and rank well
above that of any professor on the Budget Committee.

Lage: Did the Committee on Committees every consider appointing someone
to the Budget Committee that the Budget Committee had not
suggested?

Brown: Yes, during my last year on the committee, and when I was chairman,
we were told that the Committee on Committees was thinking of
appointing a person or two to the committee that were not on our
list and that were definitely not outstanding scholars in a
disciplinary area to be represented. So I asked to meet with the
committee. At the meeting, I took some pains to explain how
important it was for the university to have professors on the
committee who could and would make discriminating and sound
judgments on who should be appointed and promoted. In doing so, I
insisted that the Budget Committee needed to have at least one
academic star (such as a Nobel Prize winner or a scholar who had
received a number of offers from the country's leading
universities), that other members of the Budget Committee should be
senior professors widely recognized for scholarly achievement, and
that no junior professor with a mediocre record should be included
because he or she probably would be unable to take a strong and

196

independent position about the appointment of distinguished
scholars .

Dealing with Troubled Departments

Lage: Was the committee cognizant of departments that might be considered
weaker, troubled departments?

Brown: Yes, when considering a recommendation for an appointment or
promotion in any department, we had to consider not only the
special interests and concerns of the chairman who made the
recommendation but those of the various contending groups within
the department. Clear and well-known conflicts emerged in several
departments over such basic questions as what constitutes good
teaching and creative research. On teaching, some would claim that
a good teacher is one who can deliver such interesting lectures
that hundreds of students always sign up for any course that he or
she teaches, while others tend to brand this kind of teaching as
entertainment and to insist that effective teaching is only that
which arouses enthusiasm for learning. Again some insist that good
teaching is making sure that the student learns the basic facts
about a subject (coverage), while others say that teaching is not
really good until each student is stirred to raise questions about
the interactive meaning of the facts.

On research, some would claim that creative research is
essentially the discovery of a new body of knowledge, while others
would demean this as legwork and claim that research is truly
creative only when understanding is deepened by the development of
theories (models, paradigms) about connections and relationships
between diverse forces. In language departments, both teaching and
research tend to be evaluated differently by native speakers of the
language and those who deal with the language linguistically,
philologically, or as an instrument of literary expression.

All these differences have to be taken into account by the
Budget Committee when it sets up a special committee to provide an
independent assessment of a particular recommendation. If one
nominee to a special committee is known to be a strong advocate of
a particular kind of teaching or research, an effort is made to add
a professor of a different type, for it is assumed that all these
different approaches to teaching and research have value, and that
the department and university will be stronger, and perform their
functions better, if academic diversity is nourished.

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While such differences between professors do create problems
and difficulties (especially for the chairman and administrators
above), they should not be considered as signs of weakness but of
intellectual vitality and strength. To be sure, they create
problems for the Budget Committee, and therefore might be thought
of as troublesome, but these problems should be faced and solved,
not treated as signs of weakness to be eliminated. Indeed, we
tended to feel that a department really was weak if such
differences about good teaching and creative research did not
exist.

There are other indicators of departmental weakness, such as
having a chairman who does not do his or her homework, or operates
as a self-serving dictator. But during my three years on the
Budget Committee we did not consider any single department as being
weak on either of these two counts. (Of course, some departments
were less charged than others by intellectual differences, and some
were less diligent than others in doing their homework on
appointments and promotions.) The most valid reason for
considering a department weak is that its teaching and research are
not very distinguished. Since every major department at Berkeley
rates as one of the strongest in the country, not one can be
properly called weak. But back in the 1950s Chancellor Clark Kerr
did ask Carl Bridenbaugh why the history department was so weak.
It was assumed by the young Turks that he was saying we lacked
distinction in teaching and research.

Anyway, we felt the department was weaker than it should be.
That is why we took the bold step of writing individually to the
dean to recommend the appointment of Bill Bouwsma (later elected
president of the American Historical Association) instead of the
person favored by the majority of the department. It should be
noted that actions to remove this weakness were not initiated by
the chancellor (who simply fired his question) , or by the dean or
departmental chairman, but by six junior members of the department
who individually wrote letters to the dean. So while members of
the Budget Committee may be cognizant of weak or troubled
departments, they are in no position to initiate corrective action.
All they can do is make certain that appointments and promotions
are granted to distinguished scholars.

Lage: Do you remember any particular examples from this time? Any
particular controversy?

Brown: Not when I was on the committee. I do remember that, before or
afterward, a couple of departments became so deeply embroiled in
controversy that an appointment of a chairman from outside the
department was either made or considered. While such action may
have oee i based on what the Budget Committee or its special review

198

committees had written about a department's recommendations, I am
quite sure that corrective action was not initiated at any point
within the review process. Such action was taken by the chancellor
or dean.

In the history department's "revolution", the Budget Committee
and the special review committee undoubtedly played a key role in
the decision-making that led to Bill's appointment, but I repeat:
that appointment was not initiated by the chancellor, the dean, the
Budget Committee, or the departmental chairman, but by six young
Turks .

Lage: So you never came to blows with the chancellor?

Brown: Absolutely not. He never favored one appointment and we another.

As I have already noted, if there was disagreement, it was usually,
if not always, over the salary to be offered an appointee or
whether an associate professor should be promoted to full professor
at that particular time. The chancellor consistently took the more
generous stance: either he wanted to offer an appointee a higher
salary than we had recommended, or to make a promotion to full
professor that we had not recommended. In either case, members of
the Budget Committee usually did not object, because the chancellor
was usually trying to make sure that the candidate for appointment
would accept our offer, or that an associate professor would not be
tempted to leave.

Affirmative Action in Appointments of Faculty

Lage: Were there guiding principles that you had, maybe not even
consciously, as you were reviewing all these cases from all
departments on the Berkeley campus?

Brown: Oh yes, although I don't think there were any written guidelines
other than the standard, but frequently revised, statement on the
three criteria for appointment and promotion of faculty: superior
teaching, creative research, and excellent community service. We
were always intent on making recommendations that would assure, and
provide recognition for, academic excellence and that were not
influenced, negatively or positively, by such non-academic
considerations as political preference, economic wealth, social
position, or religious belief. And of course we tried our best to
detect and discount all assessments that were sexist or racist in
character.

Lage: Had issues of affirmative action cor.e into play in th<2 sixties?

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Brown: A turning point came in the sixties. During my first term there

was not much action of this type, but during my second term in the
seventies there was a lot. And there was a change in who was
"affirmed". After the sixties, we seemed to be preoccupied with
the admission, appointment, and promotion (affirmation) of more
women. But gradually the increase in the number of women came to
be coupled with an increase in the number of Asians, especially
those influenced by Confucian teachings on the importance of
learning. Now, whenever we favor or oppose affirmative action, we
seem to be thinking mainly of blacks and Hispanics. Not
surprisingly, many women and Asians have come out in support of the
Regents' recent move against affirmative action.

Lage: What is your own position?

Brown: I am in favor of affirmative action as I define such action, not as
it is commonly thought of by those who oppose it.

Lage: How do you define it?

Brown: I would define affirmative action as any and all activity (laws,

regulations, announcements, speeches, ads, sermons, demonstrations,
et cetera) that advocates or affirms the right of any human
individual to obtain any kind of training or work solely on the
basis of merit. This means that I favor a strict and fair
enforcement of laws and regulations that require admissions and
employment to be granted only on the basis of merit and regardless
of sex, race, or religion. That was what affirmative action meant
to me when I was in my second term as chairman and when we were
forced to publicize all openings, consider all applicants, and be
prepared to prove that we had not appointed a white man to a
professorship who was less qualified than a female or minority
applicant. Under that kind of pressure, and with that
understanding of affirmative action, more women and blacks were
appointed to positions in the history department. We had made
appointments of distinguished female historians earlier (such as
Adrienne Koch and Natalie Davis) but after the days of the Free
Speech Movement of the later 1960s, many more were appointed.

Lage: So you think affirmative action did make a difference?

Brown: Yes, I do, although that is a conclusion that can not be documented
or proved. Some might say that we hired more women simply because
more qualified female candidates were available at that time. On
the other hand, some say that, under the pressure of affirmative
action, we appointed some women mainly because they were women--
that we failed to recommend appointments solely on the basis of
merit. My own view lies between those two extremes: that we
consciously or unconsciously hired more women (and a few blacks)

200

because, under the pressure of affirmative action, more women and
non-whites were receiving Ph.D. degrees in history and closer
attention was being given to all applicants, not just to those who
were white males.

Lage : Does this mean that you are opposed to quotas?

Brown: For admissions to the university, and appointments to its faculty,
yes. The history department was never to my knowledge saddled with
a quota (at least during my years as chairman) and I was therefore
not forced to consider what position I or the department should
take on this issue. But since the recent decision of the Regents,
I have done some more reading and thinking about this problem and
have come to favor affirmative action as defined above, because (1)
this is likely to add diversity to the faculty, (2) being a public-
supported institution of higher learning, the university has a
special obligation to approve admissions and make appointments
strictly on the basis of demonstrated ability and achievement in
learning, and (3) the proportion of women and Asians admitted and
appointed now seems to be about right.

Lage: How about the blacks and Hispanics?

Brown: Clearly the proportion there is not right. And it is wrong, even
disgraceful, that this is so. But since the university is an
institution of higher learning, and the problem of low admissions
and appointments for these people should not be solved by lowering
academic standards, I am inclined to think that we must rely on
other social institutions (the family, church, pre-school, and
school districts) for instilling in young people of these minority
groups the will to learn. The university at this time and in this
situation should concern itself only with higher learning, not with
its earlier stages.

Lage: Wouldn't it be better if such a position were taken and publicized?

Brown: I think so. At present much of the public seems to feel that the
Regents and the Governor are right to oppose affirmative action
that is equaled with preferences and quotas for admissions, and to
feel that members of the faculty and the chancellor are wrong to
oppose what the Regents have said and done. In this situation, I
am afraid that the taxpayers are becoming less willing to pay the
high cost of running our university system.

Lage: Can anything be done to improve our image?

Brown: I am not sure that the chancellor or president can do much, but the
Academic Senate might. Probably my thinking about this has been
influenced excessively by the resolution that the sen tte passed

201

back in 1965 that served to eliminate the threat of a student
strike. But I can not help thinking that a clear statement,
approved by an overwhelming majority of the senate, would assure
everyone that when we favor affirmative action we are not favoring
preferences and quotas but affirming the right of everyone,
regardless of gender or race, to obtain admission to the university
solely on the basis of merit. Of course, some professors are
undoubtedly in favor of preferences and quotas, while others will
surely vote against any affirmation of rights for women and /or
minorities. But my sense of what the faculty thinks (admittedly
based on limited evidence) convinces me that most of them will vote
for a resolution that comes down on the side of equality and
fairness in admitting students on the basis of merit alone. And if
such a faculty position were then publicized and explained- -in
newspapers and on TV--by university leaders, the public might come
to look at the university in a better light. But this will not
happen unless some committee or individual undertakes to formulate
such a resolution and then sees that it is approved by the Academic
Senate.

Lage: That sounds like a job for a member of the Budget Committee
[laughter] .

The Statewide Budget Committee. 1965-1967

Lage: Now let's get into the statewide Budget Committee, of which you
were a member between 1965 and 1967. How did you get on that
committee?

Brown: I must have been appointed by the chairman of the statewide

Academic Senate and selected because I was a member of the Berkeley
Budget Committee. The statewide Budget Committee was made up of
one or two members from the Budget Committees on each of the nine
campuses, and it was attended by the vice president of Academic
Affairs. Meetings were always held just before, and on the campus
where, a Board of Regents meeting was being held. This meant that
we had the opportunity to attend these meetings as observers. (It
was at such a meeting that the Regents , with Governor Reagan in
attendance, fired President Clark Kerr.) The chairmanship of the
statewide Budget Committee rotated among the chairmen of the campus
committees. Berkeley's turn came in 1966-67.

Lage: And what are the functions of the statewide Budget Committee?

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Brown: Unlike the Budget Committees on the nine campuses, the statewide
committee did not make recommendations on the appointment and
promotion of individual professors, and it did not have special
committees reviewing and making recommendations on specific cases.
Instead, it dealt with general questions about faculty salaries and
promotions throughout the university system. Two particularly
important questions were raised while I was on the committee : How
should the several million dollars set aside by the state for
salary increases to university faculty be distributed to professors
at the three different ranks? And should we drop the old system of
automatically considering every professor for a merit increase
after the lapse of a set number of years at a step of our three
professorial ranks?

To the first question, the easy answer was to divide up the
money according to rank, giving the most senior professors the
largest increases. But after a long and detailed study of the
faculty-salary situation throughout the country, we decided that
the university would be better able to attract promising scholars
if a larger percent of the increase was awarded to junior
professors. So we recommended a higher percentage increase for
assistant professors than for full professors. That recommendation
was accepted by the president and the Regents.

The second question was whether we should drop the requirement
that every professor be considered for a merit increase after a
prescribed number of years at a particular step within his or her
rank. At first, most members of the committee favored the
proposal, possibly assuming their own salaries would be increased
if advances were made only the basis of merit. But as I thought
back over my years in the U.S. Navy and compared its relatively
automatic promotions with the more fluid policy of the army, I
began to wonder if dropping the old system would not cause many
professors to spend more time doing whatever it takes to get
promoted (such as stirring up offers from other universities) and
thus have less time and energy for his teaching and research
functions. I became more certain that this might happen as I
recalled stories of the politicking associated with promotions in
the army and remembered how very little attention seemed to be paid
to rank and promotion in the navy, at least in the offices in which
I worked. I was astounded to find a senior officer doing the same
kind of a work that was being done by a very junior office sitting
at the next desk. All officers and enlisted men seemed intent on
doing their job well and promptly, not on whether someone else had
more salary and a higher rank or on trying to do what they could to
rectify some real or perceived disparity. Everyone seemed to think
he was being paid enough and would, sooner or later, receive a
proper promotion. So I gradually came to favor and appreciate the

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navy way of handling promotions. And that probably affected by
thinking about the proposal to drop the old, relatively automatic,
way of handling promotions and merit increases at the university.

In this connection I was probably also influenced by
conversations with professors of history at Stanford. They told me
that promotions and merit increases there were very hard to get and
that Stanford did not have anything like the UC requirement that a
professor be considered for merit increase and/or promotion after
the lapse of a fixed number of years. My friends at Stanford
complained bitterly about their being able to get advances or
promotions only when they received good offers from other
universities. I did not think UC professors would really like to
go down that road. So I spoke up against the proposal that we
discard the old arrangement. But I could not convince other
members of the statewide Budget Committee that they should reject
the proposal. After considerable debate, we decided not to take a
position on it but wait until the next monthly meeting, but to find
out in the meantime what committees and persons on our home
campuses thought about it. At the next meeting, one member of the
committee after another reported that, on his particular campus
there was a strong (almost unanimous) view that the present system
of advancement should not be scrapped. [laughter]

Lage: That is interesting. Even though you were the only one on the

committee-
Brown: At the beginning, yes. UC professors generally seemed to feel that

they were being properly treated and that if they continued to do

their best to perform as good teachers and productive scholars,

they would eventually obtain proper recognition.

Lage: Was it as powerful a committee statewide as it was on the campus?

Brown: In a way it was more powerful. As you will recall, it was made up
largely of chairmen of campus Budget Committees; its
recommendations were at the personnel-policy level; all our
meetings were attended by the vice president of Academic Affairs;
we met at the time and campus of a monthly meeting of the Board of
Regents; and our recommendations went through the vice president to
the president and the Regents.

Lage: Would you look at the appointment of University Professors?

Brown: Logically we would, but I do not recall having such a case during
the two years that I was on the statewide Committee.

204

Lage: That sounds like the place for it. I know that during these years
and even earlier, there were questions about allocations of
resources between campuses, about whether Berkeley was going to
suffer from the development of new campuses .

Brown: I do not remember that questions of this type came up when I was on
the committee but I do remember, at an earlier time, considerable
discussion and debate on the Berkeley campus about the pros and
cons (mostly cons) of centering resources in some new fields at one
campus or another. But since no noticeable reductions were made at
Berkeley (at least in the Asian field), I did not become
particularly excited or bothered about what was being proposed or
done.

I do recall some stormy weather about an agreement that was
reached between Stanford and Berkeley libraries: Berkeley was to
concentrate on the acquisition of published sources and academic
journals, and Stanford on perishable materials. The agreement made
a lot of sense since money for acquisitions was limited on both
campuses. Today, East Asian students and scholars working in the
East Asian area have extremely rich resources precisely because
Stanford has spent more money on modern materials and Berkeley on
published classics and academic journals.

The Firing of President Clark Kerr

Lage: Do you remember any other issue in which you became involved?

Brown: Yes, one in which I was involved peripherally: the firing of

President Clark Kerr by the Board of Regents when Governor Ronald
Reagan was present. Because that was the year I was chairman of
the statewide committee, I was in University Hall in Berkeley on
the day this occurred. Like other people milling around the
building that day, I was preoccupied with trying to predict, and
understand why, each of the Regents would be for or against the
president. And like most others, I was surprised by the outcome.
Later, we had a very well-attended meeting of the Academic Senate
at which I proposed a resolution that was seconded and passed. It
criticized (1 forget the verb that was used) the Regents for
allowing politics to affect its decisions on university affairs.
It is well known that the Board of Regents was intended, from the
start, to shield the university from the vagaries of current
political differences. And here they had become an instrument of
Reagan's effort to follow up on the anti-university and anti-Kerr

205

position that he had taken during the gubernatorial campaign. He
had made political capital out of blaming the university, and
particularly its President Clark Kerr, for allowing the Free Speech
Movement to "get out of hand", and now he was apparently trying to
gain additional political capital out of personally attending the
meeting of the Board of Regents and getting Kerr fired.

Lage: Were you favorably disposed toward Clark Kerr as president?

Brown: Yes, most members of the faculty were. As you will recall, he not
only asked why the history department was so weak but was
instrumental in providing the FTE we needed for making our
department one of the strongest in the country. (In a conversation
that I had with Clark a few years ago, he clearly felt good about
the part that he had taken in what I have called the Bouwsma
revolution.) The creation of the tutorial-oriented campus at Santa
Cruz, too, was largely his idea (he apparently was thinking of his
own Swarthmore College as the model), and apparently it was his
plan to make each campus strong in particular areas, thereby
reducing the amount of public funds used for the same type of
teaching and research at all campuses. Although many felt that he
might have handled the FSM better, most of us felt that he had been
an excellent president at a rather difficult time.

Lage: Did you have personal contact with him?

Brown: Yes, on two or three occasions. The first came after my return to
the university from leave for two and half years to head first the
Asia Foundation office in Hong Kong and then their office in Tokyo.
Since this long leave was not in accord with policy, and was
unusual, he politely but firmly requested that I make no more
requests for such a long leave of absence.

Then when I was chairman, and Chancellor Kerr had returned
from a trip to Southeast Asia, he called me to say that he had been
in contact with a rather famous specialist on Southeast Asian
history who had indicated an interest in receiving an appointment
from Berkeley. This information was reported at a meeting of the
tenured members of the department, who considered the man more like
a popular journalist than a distinguished historian. Maybe our
less-than-enthusiastic response was due also to the old tradition
(going back to 1923) that appointments and promotions should be
initiated by the faculty, not the Chancellor. At any rate, he
accepted our negative response.

Lage: He would suggest--

206

Brown: Yes, but not demand, or make an appointment, until he had received
a recommendation from the Budget Committee, which of course would
not make a recommendation if it had not been initiated by a
department.

Lage: So there is this relationship between the faculty and the
administration- -

Brown: Yes, a relationship that, together with generous funding by the

state, has enabled the university to become a really distinguished
institution of higher learning. The relationship was centered on
the functions of the Budget Committee and its special review
committees. If an appointment is not initiated at the departmental
level, and then recommended by the faculty through the Budget
Committee, it is not made.

Chairing the Academic Senate at Berkeley. 1971-1972

Lage: Let's talk a bit about chairing the Academic Senate. Was that the
first year of Albert Bowker's term as chancellor?

Brown: Yes, Bowker was chancellor from 1971 to 1980, and in 1971 I was

appointed chairman of the history department for a second term, and
was also appointed by the Committee on Committees as chairman of
the Academic Senate. So I was called on to make a short welcoming
speech, in behalf of the faculty, at his inauguration held in the
Greek Theatre.

Lage: It looked like things had settled down by that time, or else the
minutes are incomplete, because they only show two meetings.

Brown: There were surely more than two--I can distinctly remember events
of three. But you are right, things were pretty quiet by that
time. I do recall Chancellor Bowker attending at least two
meetings and, at the end of one, saying something like, "You run a
tight ship." One issue being worked out then with the Policy
Committee was the employment of a person to represent the Berkeley
faculty at Sacramento. I remember serving as an ex-officio member
of the Policy Committee when this was being discussed.

Lage: What was the purpose of that?

Brown: It was to represent faculty interests directly in Sacramento.

207

Lage: Would that have been a statewide program?

Brown: I think that was for Berkeley alone. The same sort of development
may have occurred on other campuses. I am not sure.

Lage: It wasn't a time of great upset on campus, at least.

Brown: No. We had a couple of well-attended meetings, but only the
question of whether we should have a paid representative in
Sacramento seemed to be of much interest.

Lage: What made Chancellor Bowker say that you ran a tight ship?

Brown: I suppose it was because I was trying to increase attendance by doing
what I could to see that we consider only recommendations presented
by committees, and to keep the debate from becoming irrelevant,
repetitive, and boring. This was also how I tried to handle
departmental meetings. At both the departmental and Academic Senate
levels I tried to avoid meetings when there was no definite committee
recommendation to consider, and to keep the meetings as short as
possible. Our departmental meetings were generally held at 5:00 in
the evening--! may have been influenced by President Sproul's
practice of calling meetings at that hour, just before dinner
[laughter]. I remember, too, that Sproul placed the most important
items of business at the end of the meeting, when those in attendance
were not apt, because of hunger, to let the proceedings drag.

Special Committee to Review Foreign Language Instruction

Lage: Oh, there can be an awful lot of meetings in these organizations.
Were you on other interesting committees, other than the Budget
Committee?

Brown: There were many, especially review committees. But three special
committees seemed especially important. The first came back in
1959 or 1960, I believe, during my first term as departmental
chairman, when I was appointed by the chancellor to head a special
committee to review foreign language instruction on the Berkeley
campus. The second came in 1965 when I was appointed by President
Kerr to a special faculty committee charged with recommending a new
chancellor. The third came two or three years later when I was
asked by Chancellor Michael Heyman to head a special committee
charged with reviewing the East Asian Library. All three were

208

important assignments. Should I got into a bit of detail about
each?

Lage: Please. Why was a study of the foreign language situation
important?

Brown: It was important because a number of professors whose graduate
students were required to use one or more foreign languages for
research were complaining that courses in the established language
departments were not giving their students the kind of language
training they needed: namely, a working knowledge of the language
obtained within a reasonable length of time. Because I was one of
the complainers and was also chairman of my department, the
chancellor set up a special review committee and made me its
chairman. It was a good committee made up of influential persons
(even chairmen) of various foreign language departments. We had
many meetings and reached four interrelated conclusions.

First, that the appointment and promotion of professors in all
language departments was based on their achievements in special
areas of the language (linguistics, philology, or literature), not
in applied linguistics or the teaching of foreigners how to speak,
read, and comprehend the language for study and research in one of
the disciplines. Second, that most of the basic language
instruction (the first two or three years of course work in the
language, and the major portion of a language department's
offerings) were usually handled by native speakers of the language
or by graduate students specializing in some such academically
"respectable" area as philology or literature. Third, at the time
of appointment neither native speakers of the language nor advanced
graduate students usually had had any training or experience as
language teachers, and almost never were given ladder appointments
or tenure on the basis of demonstrated achievement in language
teaching. And fourth, since language teachers could not hope to
reach the professorial ladder by teaching the language well or by
developing new methods of teaching their students—in record time-
how to speak and read the language for research, there was little
or no incentive for appointing or promoting professors who were
specialists in what is called applied linguistics.

(Later on, when I was director of Inter-University Center for
Japanese Language Studies in Japan, I discovered that great
advances were being made in applied linguistics in some
universities, largely in programs under the rubric of English as a
Second Language, but, as far as I know, not in established language
departments at Berkeley.)

209

Lage: So what did you recommend?

Brown: We recommended that a special school or department of applied

linguistics be set up at Berkeley. I remember working hard on the
report and obtaining unanimous support from the committee. But
after it was submitted, nothing happened.

Lage: It was rejected?

Brown: As far as I know, it was not explicitly rejected by the chancellor
or anyone else. It was simply a recommendation that was not
implemented .

Lage: Why was that?

Brown: Because no one, including me and other members of the committee,
moved to set up a new applied linguistics institute, school, or
department. No one (including me) had either the urge or the time
to undertake such a task. Departmental chairmen who were on the
committee, including Ed Schaeffer who was then chairman of the
Department of East Asian Languages, probably did not make such a
move because they realized, consciously or unconsciously, that a
new applied linguistics department would assume the responsibility
of teaching first- and second-year courses in Chinese, Japanese,
and other East Asian languages, and would therefore be taking over
a large portion of the instruction traditionally handled by the
Department of East Asian Languages. And this, they must have
reasoned, would drastically reduced their hours of instruction and
their case for FTE. That is, giving up introductory language
teaching would surely result in a definite decline (if not demise)
of established language departments. So even though a chairman who
was a member of our committee might have favored the creation of a
new unit of applied linguistics, he probably had no urge to press
for change that would undermine his own position and that of his
department. So nothing happened.

I still think that substantial improvement in the teaching of
foreign languages will come only with the development of new
techniques for teaching all four dimensions of the language
(hearing, speaking, reading, and writing) by specialists in applied
linguistics receiving proper recognition and experimenting with
computer techniques for interactive self -study. But the most
significant advances will probably not be made in established
language departments at Berkeley where no special importance is
assigned to achievement in applied linguistics but elsewhere.

210
Search Committee for Berkeley Chancellor. 1965

Lage: And how about the search for a new chancellor?

Brown: That assignment was not so onerous, and more gratifying. We were
appointed by the president and charged with advising him on the
selection of our next chancellor. We first invited suggestions
from the faculty, which resulted in several members of the special
committee (including me) being named as possible candidates. So we
agreed that no member of the special committee would be considered
or recommended for the post of chancellor.

Lage: That was when [Glenn] Seaborg left, do you think?

Brown: No, Seaborg 's term ended in 1961, and we met in 1965. Clark Kerr,
as president, set up the committee and fed names to us for
consideration. I am quite sure that he was the one who first
suggested the name of Roger Heyns.

Lage: Does the faculty favor bringing someone from outside? Or did you
feel that in that particular case that was appropriate?

Brown: The faculty has no fixed position on whether the chancellor should
be from inside or outside the UC system. I think our previous
chancellor, Chang-Lin Tien, was a member of the Berkeley faculty,
wasn't he?

Lage: Yes, before he went to UC Irvine as vice chancellor.

Brown: There is no fixed rule, but we agreed that no member of the special
selection committee should be a candidate.

Lage: That was safer, I am sure. Did you have anything to do with
helping Heyns learn about the campus?

Brown: Before turning to your question, I would like to say that "safer"
does not quite describe the position we took. Rather I would say
that we took this position because we undoubtedly realized that no
member of the committee would have been a generally acceptable to
the faculty, the president, or the committee itself. If there had
been one among us who had been a strong candidate, he would
logically have been asked to resign from the committee.

Now as to your question or helping Heyns to learn about the
campus, I should say that that wai not our responsibility, although

211

we did have a meeting with him just before we made our final
recommendation. That meeting was held at the chancellor's
residence when Roger startled us with this question: "What would
you expect me to achieve during my term as chancellor?"

Lage: Did you think it was a good question?
Brown: Yes, it was an excellent question.
Lage: And how did you answer it?

Brown: I do not remember in detail, but probably we all had something to
say about our desire for leadership that would help to improve the
public image of Berkeley, an image that had been badly tarnished
during and following the Free Speech Movement.

Review of the East Asian Library

Lage: And how about your third special committee assignment?

Brown: That came just two or three years before my retirement in 1978 when
I was asked by the chancellor to chair a committee charged with
reviewing the East Asian Library. Every department and institute
of the university is usually reviewed by an outside professorial
committee every five years. So this was a periodic review, but it
was also a response to complaints from faculty in the East Asiatic
field who maintained that the acquisition of books, particularly in
the Chinese field, was inefficient if not wasteful. There were
also some rumors about a careless, or possibly fraudulent, use of
funds .

A key member of the committee was David Keightley of the
history department, a professor who had been especially unhappy
about irregularities in the acquisition of Chinese books. He spent
many hours checking holdings in various fields of Chinese studies
and found many duplicate purchases, as well as great gaps in our
holdings. We also listened to reports from various members of the
EAL staff. The majority of the committee reached the conclusion
that the librarian should be replaced since we did not think that
he was capable of changing his rather irresponsible way of
administering library affairs. But one member of the committee, a
man who held a high position in the main library and who had
recently backed this EAL li>rarian for promotion, was opposed to

212

the majority position. That member of the committee could not see
any incompetence and could not therefore go along with the majority
of the review committee—he actually wrote a long minority report.

Before any action was taken on our recommendation, I left for
Japan to take over (after retirement) as director of the Inter-
University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. But I
later heard that there was quite a battle over whether our
recommendation should be implemented. The member of the committee
who had written the minority report seems to have done his best
first to block the removal of the librarian, and then, when this
failed, to exert his influence to see that the new librarian should
be another professional librarian, apparently recognizing no value
in having him replaced with a scholar familiar with materials
written in an East Asian language.

The committee had recommended that the librarian be replaced
by Professor Donald Shively of Harvard, a scholar in the field of
Japanese literature who had had considerable administrative
experience. The Shively appointment was finally made, but only
after the lapse of some time. It seems that the appointment was
finally consummated because of strong and persistent support by
Robert Middlekauff , a professor of history who was then holding the
position of dean. The earlier conflict within the review
committee, as well as the later conflict over who should be
appointed as the new librarian of the East Asian Library, were two
notable by-products of a continuing tension (in the area of library
policy) between the faculty who use the library for research and
teaching and the professional librarians who are specialists in
cataloguing, acquisitions, circulation. In this case the faculty
won, but it is probably a temporary victory, although Don was
replaced recently by another scholar: Thomas Havens, a historian
who obtained his Ph.D. in Japanese history under me.

Lage: Why do you think that was just a temporary victory?

Brown: Because I assume that librarians will have more to say about the
appointment of persons to head the various branch libraries . But
maybe they will succeed in getting professional librarians to head
the EAL library only if they can find candidates who are familiar
with Asian- language materials. Moreover, for that job, and
probably others, it is also important to appoint persons who can
raise money. My guess is that a scholar is more likely to have the
clout and contacts needed for money-raising than a person whose
qualifications are limited to training in the various fields of
library science.

213

A Fuller Account of Prevent ine the All-University Strike. December
1966

[Interview 5: April 24, 1995] #1

Lage: Since our last session you did a little research, as an historian

will. You found some answers to the unanswerable. [See pages 151-
156]

Brown: Do you want me to tell you how I found about it?
Lage: Yes, tell about what happened.

Brown: In our last meeting, we were talking about the motion that I made.
I was unsure of the date. We hadn't found any Academic Senate
minutes that said anything about a resolution of that type in those
years. Still, I remembered that it had happened. As we were
talking, I said something about Lynn White objecting to what the
Berkeley faculty had done.

Then it suddenly dawned on me that we were then both members
of the statewide Budget Committee. I was chairman of the statewide
Budget Committee as well as the chairman of the Berkeley Budget
Committee in the year 1965- '66. So, I went to the Academic Senate
office, and the secretary kindly gave me the volume of minutes for
that academic year.

Sure enough, I found the minutes of this special meeting that
had been called for December 5, 1966. It had, I think, the biggest
attendance that a senate up to that time had had. There were 1,045
persons present. It was in Wheeler Auditorium. I remember the
occasion very well. I was talking to somebody about the attendance
of that- meeting just a few days ago, and they said that this must
have been two-thirds of the entire senate, which is roughly true.
I remember that around 1,500 professors were members of the
Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate at the time. I also know
that in a given year, roughly one-third of the faculty was away on
sabbaticals. So this meant that most everybody on campus was
there.

It was a very sticky time because on the previous Wednesday,
there had been a to-do in the Sproul Hall Plaza, at the table of
the United States Navy recruiting office. They were trying to get
recruits. There was a demonstration there, a sit-in. I don't know
what all went on, I was not ther •;. It was reported that the

214

police, probably the police of the city of Berkeley, had arrested
several students — seven or eight, as I recall. That caused the
other students to become angry, and more and more meetings were
held.

On Thursday, several hundred students met together and issued
demands on the university. That was fully covered in the
newspaper. Students stopped going to classes, not in masses yet,
but something like a fourth of the students stayed away. I think
this was on Thursday. On Friday, there was another student meeting
attended by roughly 8,000 students, according to the Daily Cal. On
that day too, fewer and fewer students went to class.

Two departments, anthropology and sociology, voted as a
department to support the students in their demands. That was on
Friday. A huge number of classes were not held. Because further
demands were made on Friday, it was anticipated that on Monday we
would have a full-blown strike.

As I read the newspaper on that rainy Saturday morning, I got
the urge to do something. I suppose I had the urge because I was
then chairman of the Berkeley Budget Committee and also chairman of
the statewide Budget Committee, which, as I explained in an earlier
part of this interview, was a powerful and important committee. We
worked hard on everything that came up. I suppose that position
made me feel a bit responsible. Anyway, 1 began thinking about
what response the faculty logically could and should make to these
student demands, a response that hopefully would prevent a strike.

After jotting down a few things that I thought we might be
able to say, I called Irv Scheiner. I asked him to come down, and
he did. He was an assistant professor, but a man of good judgment.
I thought he would be a good man to talk with.

After our meeting, I went alone to other key faculty people,
such as Mike Heyman, who was then chairman of the Policy Committee.
That committee has a long, interesting history. I think it had
been established just two years before as a result of an earlier
student upheaval.

Then I called Arthur Kip, who was chairman of the Academic
Senate. I remember going to his office on that rainy morning, and
he didn't really feel much of an urge to do anything over the
weekend. But I think he must have been the one who called a
special meeting for the following Monday morning.

215

Then after that, we started having meetings1, one after the
other, and all day Saturday and Sunday.

Lage: Were these informal?

Brown: Informal meetings. We would call various people who we knew were
interested. Incidentally, already there had been a meeting of 200
faculty members, mostly people on the left, people who were
sympathetic with the students and the students' demands. They had
come out in support of the student demands.

Lage: Did you get any of them in your meetings?

Brown: Yes, I got a lot of those people to come and meet with us, to see
if they could agree to a resolution of the type I was formulating.
Charlie Sellers must have been one of those, because in the minutes
of the meeting, I see that he is the man who seconded the motion.
I know he had been a very active member of that radical left group.

Lage: Did you get in any of the more conservative professors?

Brown: That was why we were so busy, we were calling everybody. We were
trying to do two things: to build support for the motion, and to
get various people to participate in formulating it. I remember
Henry Nash Smith, a very distinguished professor of English, coming
to one of our meetings. Carl Schorske too was consulted—he was
very prominent at the time and, as I recall, a member of the Policy
Committee.

Lage: Where did Henry Nash Smith line up in the spectrum?

Brown: He was on the radical side. Sometimes it was called the Committee
of 200. Charlie Sellers was on that side. On the right side, the
more conservative side, were a lot of people like Bob Scalapino and
Henry May (another historian). But most of the faculty were in the
middle and associated with what was called then the Faculty Forum.
The Faculty Forum was already in existence and I was its chairman.
So maybe it was in that capacity that I felt I should do something.

Anyway, after all these discussions all weekend long, we came
up with a resolution that we thought many could accept. I remember
having a meeting in Dwinelle Hall, in my office, of concerned
people, including Mike Heyman. That was when Chancellor Heyns
called me in to his office. He made a personal request that I
change one of the clauses. I can't remember which one now, but I
expect he wanted to be a little more tough on the stulen'.s. But we

216

couldn't change it at that late moment. At least, that was the
position I took, and I think he was a bit unhappy about my
response.

Lage: Was it your feeling that you couldn't change because you had worked
it out with other people?

Brown: So many other people had become involved in working this out, I
just didn't feel like I singlehandedly could make a change, and
there was no time left for further consultation. I probably also
felt that we shouldn't take a stiff er stand.

Anyway, it was submitted, and Mike Heyman, who was chairman of
the Policy Committee, was the right one to move the resolution. He
had the job that made it natural for him to take that position.
Then, I see by the minutes that Charlie Sellers, who was
representative of the left-wing group, seconded it. I guess it is
fair to say that the resolution was more left than right.

A substitute motion was moved. This was revised to say: "We
express confidence in the chancellor." It was approved and then
the original resolution was passed. It recommended that charges
against the students be dropped and that a committee or commission
be established to explore various ways of giving the students more
say in university governance. There were five points to the
resolution.

Lage: We are going to attach this as an insert. I think it is pretty
important. [See Appendix A]

The other thing was opposing the use of external police force.

Brown: We didn't think it was right to have external police brought in,
except under very special circumstances. We spelled that out. I
think even the right side didn't want police from the outside.

Lage: Were strong feelings expressed? Do you remember the meeting?

Brown: It was a normal Academic Senate meeting. Everyone was calm and
rational, no anger. But there was concern and a lot of people
wanted to say something about it. There was this substitute motion
by the right, about which there was a good deal of debate. After
that was turned down, and after [Reginald] Zelnik (another history
department professor, who is now chairman of the department) moved
that a sentence be added to the clause about student governance.

217

That is there. That was passed. After that passed, the original
resolution went through by a pretty big majority.

Lage: Seven-hundred-ninety-five to twenty-eight.
Brown: Over 100 abstained.

Lage: One hundred and forty-three abstentions. I wonder what type of
person abstained.

Brown: The whole right side. If they didn't vote against it, they

abstained. These were the ones who didn't want to yield one iota
to student demands. They felt that the students had no right to
make demands of this sort, and were against it.

Lage: What happened after the meeting? What effect did the meeting have?

Brown: In an earlier interview I talked about the students all lining up
on the outside and clapping as we left. I don't think I have ever
heard or seen this at any other meeting. The students were all
gathered outside Wheeler and applauded. They were obviously
pleased.

Lage: There must have been speakers so they could hear. I remember some
of those meetings.

Brown: They were listening to it over radio, I think. They knew

everything that had transpired in the meeting. I think it was
being broadcast outside. I don't know just how. That was a
surprising development. I think I have told about the reaction of
Professors Schorske and Scalapino, their personal reaction to my
part in it. And to Lynn White. I don't think I have anything
further to add.

The end of the strike was attributed to the action of the
faculty and the ASUC student body, which also voted to ask that the
strike come to an end. There were still some complaints and still
some unhappiness among some students, but there was no strike.

Lage: It is an interesting study in the power of the faculty versus the
administration. Did the administration then take up and follow
these suggestions?

Brown: They did. It is assumed that what the faculty recommended the

administration would accept, and apparently they did. I do know
that the recommendation of a committee to study the student

218

governance was set up. Action was taken along that line. As I
recall, one student at least was appointed to almost every Senate
committee, except the Budget Committee. I don't think one ever got
added to the Budget Committee.

Lage: [laughs] You kept that sacrosanct.

Brown: I think for good reasons. We felt that would make it less likely
that the committee could function effectively, respect
confidentiality, and get true and honest judgments about the
academic qualifications of people we were considering.

Lage: That's understandable. Do you remember any further discussion with
Chancellor Heyns following this?

Brown: No, not after the meeting. I think it was assumed by everyone, the
administration too, that the administration would go along with the
recommendations made by the faculty.

Lage: Because you do hear that the University of California faculty is
stronger than most probably anywhere else.

Brown: As I explained earlier about the revolution back in 1923 when the
Budget Committee was set up, the faculty did get into a stronger
position. It is stronger at the University of California than at
other universities around the country in this important area of
promotions and appointments. That carries over into other things,
too. There are times, of course, when the administration does
things that the faculty has not approved of, but it is usually on a
minor issue. It doesn't happen that often.

Lage: I am very glad you have found this out.

Brown: Yes. I am amazed that as an historian, I was four years off on
something I was so deeply involved in. [laughter]

Lage: Well, perhaps those years do tend to blur together, one raucous
meeting after another.

Mary, Ren, and Delmer Brown, 1980.

Delmer Brown with wife, Margaret, and friend, Ichiro Ishida, at Ishida's
home in Japan, circa 1990.

Taking part in white stone carrying ritual during the sixty-first
Rebuilding Ceremony at the Ise Grand Shrine in 1992.

Delmer Brown and son, Ren, on the Great Wall of China in 1998.

219

VII THE CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES, THE INTER-UNIVERSITY CENTER
FOR JAPANESE LANGUAGE STUDIES, AND BROWN'S SERVICE AND
RESEARCH ABROAD

The Center for Japanese Studies and the Strength of Japanese
Studies in Berkeley

Lage: I would like you to say more about the Center for Japanese Studies,
how it came about. We talked just a little bit about it and about
the library, but not too much about what it meant to have a center
that was interdisciplinary.

Brown: The Center for East Asian Studies came first, probably in the

1950s. Centers for particular areas of East Asia came a few years
later, probably in the 1960s. And then the Institute of East Asian
Studies emerged as an umbrella organization with centers for each
major area of East Asia. But professors in these centers and
institute continued to be full-time employees of established
departments—this was true for even the chairmen of the various
centers. A center or institute was not and is not, therefore, a
teaching unit of the university but a unit made up of professors
whose teaching and research interests are in the East Asian area or
in one particular part of it, and who are interested in working
with scholars in other departments on programs of an
interdisciplinary character.

Although the centers, and their umbrella institute, did not
develop many projects in which a problem was jointly investigated
by scholars of different disciplines, they have succeeded in
strengthening East Asian research and teaching in important ways.
They have brought East Asian teachers and students together for
colloquium sessions in which research reports (often from
professors at other universities and from Japan) are heard and
discussed by teachers and students (especially graduate students)
from several departments of the humanities and social sciences.

220

And the centers have been important instruments for procuring
financial support for a wide variety of teaching and research
programs in the East Asian field. Just as the origin and
development of the Institute for East Asian Studies were linked
with the emergence of a separate and strong East Asian Library (at
early stages Boodberg, Bingham, and Brown were associated with
both), so the growth of separate centers for Japan, China, Korea,
India, and Southeast Asia were involved, from the start, with
procuring money for the development of strong library resources in
those particular areas of East Asia. But more significant still is
the success these units have had in obtaining funds for the
research of both professors and graduate students.

Importance of the East Asian Library

Brown: Now getting back to the Center for Japanese Studies, that center
has had, from the beginning, remarkable success in three
developments that account for UC Berkeley's reputation for having
one of the strongest, if not the strongest, Japanese studies
program outside Japan. The first development was its remarkable
collection of books on Japan (mostly in Japanese) that makes
Berkeley one of the best places, if not the best, in the western
world for a student or professor to learn about Japan. The current
librarian of the East Asian Library (EAL) is Professor Thomas
Havens who received his Ph.D. in Japanese history under me and who,
before returning to Berkeley, was chairman of the history
department at Connecticut College. Havens has not only continued
to strengthen the Japanese collection but has been working with
Chancellor Tien in obtaining money for, and planning, a
multimillion dollar EAL that is to be located to the north of the
new annex to the Doe Library. Under Havens, all collections have
been strengthened by the use of computers which not only make it
easier to gain access to the materials we have but to those held in
other libraries throughout the country. Moreover, he is now adding
further strength by supporting projects for the electronic
publication of important sources and studies, making it possible
for students and scholars anywhere in the world to subject these
materials to computer research.

The second development is the approximately twenty professors
who specialize on Japan and are in the following departments:
history, East Asian languages, political science, sociology,
economics, School of Business, anthropology, art, music, and
architecture. Many have achieved great distinction and together
they are an impressive group, placing Berkeley up there with (some
would say above) Harvard, Columbia, aid Stanford as a place for a

221

serious graduate study leading to the Ph.D. degree in some field of
Japanese studies. The existence and influence of the Center for
Japanese Studies have contributed to the building of an outstanding
group of professors, most of whom use Japanese sources in their
research.

Language Training at the Inter-University Center

Brown: The third development is the emergence of remarkable support for
graduate students working toward advanced degrees in the Japanese
field. This goes beyond having a distinguished library and
professorial staff and includes special language training, and
generous grants of money for research assistance. In addition to
having an East Asian Language department that offers excellent
courses at different levels (ranging from beginning courses for
hundreds of students to advanced courses in the reading of ancient
texts for a few) , many graduate students are recommended for
admission to, and given financial support to attend, the Inter-
University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama
(formerly in Tokyo). This is for an intensive study of Japanese at
the advanced level. Taught by Japanese teachers who teach in
Japanese, the training lasts for a full academic year and requires
a student to spend most of his or her time talking, reading, and
writing Japanese, or listening to Japanese. By the end of the
program, he or she should be able to use Japanese (freely and
easily) in the profession of his choice--no longer just teachers
specializing in such traditional areas as history and literature
but practitioners of business, law, engineering, and medicine who
want to use Japanese professionally.

From my ten years as director of that program, between 1978
and 1988, I know that many, probably most, of our country's most
distinguished specialists on Japan and in a wide range of
disciplines are graduates of the program that we have come to know
as IUC [Inter-University Center]. And the Center of Japanese
Studies at Berkeley has been linked with IUC ever since the two
first came into existence back about 1960. I was at the New York
meeting at which IUC was first set up, and I may have been chairman
of the Center of Japanese Studies at the time. Other chairmen of
the center have also played key roles in its founding and
operation, especially Professor William McCullough of East Asian
Languages and Professor Thomas Smith of History. Professor
Elizabeth Berry is a graduate of IUC and is my successor as
professor of Japanese history in the history department. And other
professors in the Japanese area at Berkeley have graduated from IUC
and are active in the Center for Japanese Studies.

222
Generous Support for Research

Brown: Monetary grants for research by both professors and graduate

students have been too numerous for me to itemize or remember. But
there is one special grant, a million-dollar one made by the
Japanese government, that cannot be forgotten. That grant was made
into an endowment providing an income of approximately $100,000 per
year, depending on the amount of interest currently earned. That
grant was one of twelve of one million each made to the twelve
American universities associated with IUC. That is, if Berkeley
had not been one of the universities linked with the founding and
operation of IUC, it would not have received such a grant, income
from which is still used (as decided by a committee made up of
professors in the field of Japanese studies) for the support of
research by professors and graduate students.

Most of the money has gone to graduate students because
professors have usually obtained fellowships for research in Japan
at sabbatical time (or more often) from either the Japan
Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, one of the two Fulbright Commissions,
or the Friendship Commission. Talks with colleagues specializing
in European and other foreign areas suggest that those of us in the
Japanese field are fortunate to have so many foundations and
agencies to turn to for help when faced with the need to spend time
abroad for research. Graduate students also usually obtain a one-
year fellowships from one of these agencies when working on their
Ph.D. dissertations. From my five-year stint on the Fulbright
Commission (the Japan-United States Educational Commission) between
1979 and 1985, I know that Ph.D. candidates from Berkeley are
usually judged to be worthy of Fulbright fellowships

Linkage between the Center for Japanese Studies at Berkeley,
the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Japan,
and the several funding agencies of both the Japanese and U.S.
governments is most clearly revealed in the founding and operation
of IUC. To begin with, as chairman or former chairman of the
Center for Japanese Studies, I was the Berkeley representative at
the meeting in New York when IUC was set up. Second, I and two
other Berkeley professors (Thomas Smith and Bill McCullough) have
been both chairmen of the Center for Japanese Studies and Directors
of IUC during about one-third of its history. Third, ever since
about 1960 both the Center for Japanese Studies at Berkeley and IUC
have been generously supported by agencies of the Japanese and U.S.
governments, particularly by the Japan Foundation (Japan), the
Department of Education (U.S.), and the Japan-U.S. Friendship
Commission (Japan and the U.S.).

223

Lage:

Brown:

How does having the center lead to getting money?
center staff who help you get money?

Was it having a

Lage:

Brown:

I am not sure that we had a staff at the beginning. What enabled
us to get the support we needed was that we could and did approach
foundations not as individual scholars working on our particular
books but as a group of scholars teaching and carrying out research
in the Japanese field and sharing common problems and needs. Later
on, we did obtain clerical assistance which of course helped us to
make requests for funding at the right time and in the right way.
But we received no funding until we had convinced a foundation or
agency that we were competent scholars working on an important
aspect of Japanese life.

One of the things done by the Center for Asian Studies was to
set up an East Asian Studies program for three degrees: the A.B.,
M.A. , and Ph.D. This was done even though the Center for East
Asian Studies never had, as far as I know, a faculty member of its
own. Appointments were always in one of the established
departments .

However--! had occasion to talk to a student about this just a
few days ago--we still normally don't recommend that students get a
Ph.D. in the East Asian field because that kind of a degree will
not help them get a job. There are not many East Asian departments
around the country that employ people with a Ph.D. degree in the
broad field of East Asian Studies. Even the U.S. government seems
to be more interested in hiring a person who has a Ph.D. in one of
the established disciplines. There is a tendency, for instance, to
ask a student who has a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies: "What are you
a specialist in?" So we tend not to recommend that a student get a
Ph.D. in East Asian Studies. So there are not many who do.

I remember one student who did. I was on his Ph.D.
examination committee. I can't remember his name, but he was
getting his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies. He had a very broad
subject and insisted that he knew what he wanted. I don't know
whether he ever got a job or not.

Did you examine him differently? Did you expect him to have the
in-depth knowledge of Japanese studies?

No, I did not expect him to know as much about Japanese history as
a candidate writing a dissertation in that field, and I presume
that other members of the committee had no such expectations.
Since he was planning to do his dissertation research on some
subject that merely crossed our various fields, we were inclined to
think of him as a non-specialist in our particular disciplines.

224
Service with the Asia Foundation in Hong Kong. 1952-1954

Lage: I don't want to forget the Asia Foundation. You mentioned it in
connection with a story about Richard Nixon, but we really didn't
talk about what you were doing there. Let's start there because
that was an early aspect of your service abroad. You were with
that organization between 1952 and 1955, first as its
representative in Hong Kong and then in Tokyo. How did you get
this position with the Asia Foundation?

Brown: My first contact with the Asia Foundation was through Mr. James
Stewart, a vice president of the organization, who came to our
Berkeley home one evening to ask if I would consider spending a
year or more in Hong Kong as their representative.

Since I knew virtually nothing about the organization or what
it was trying to do, I had many questions about its aims and
policies. Stewart was very patient and clear about both,
explaining that the foundation's purpose was to strengthen overseas
Chinese cultural institutions — especially in the fields of
education, publication, and entertainment—that were free, that is,
not under the control of communist institutions and /or ideology.
He also made it quite clear that the Asia Foundation functioned as
a foundation, offering monetary grants to free Chinese cultural
activities that were in serious economic trouble. Because I had
become critical of U.S. aid programs focused on the support of
organizations set up and controlled by the U.S. --not by the local
people who were ostensibly being aided--! was pleased to hear him
say, quite emphatically, that it was the policy of the foundation
to support only programs that were initiated and run by the Chinese
themselves, not by Americans.

But there was another aspect of the appointment that was
appealing: the opportunity to live, work, and study among the
Chinese people just as I had once lived (for six years) among the
Japanese. Although one of my fields for the Ph.D. had been the Far
East as a whole, and although I had studied Chinese (Peking
dialect) for a year at Stanford, I had a strong urge to seize the
opportunity to learn more about Chinese life and culture by direct
contact. And the urge was strengthened by the knowledge that Japan
had always been located within the Chinese cultural orbit.
Moreover, my wife Mary and my son Ren (only six years old) seemed
to like the idea, although my daughter Charlotte (then fourteen)
obviously did not. We must have assumed that living abroad would
enrich her education. Anyway, we decided to accept the
appointment .

Lage: Did you have tenure at that time?

225

Brown: I had tenure by the time this decision came up.

Difficulties of Bridging Two Cultures

Lage : This seems like a good time to quote something to you from an

interview with Elizabeth Huff. She quotes Mr. Boodberg. He said
of somebody who stayed eight years in Japan (maybe it was you) , "It
cannot be done. You may not, without jeopardizing your whole brain
and soul, forsake your own cultural heritage and try to take on
another."1 Does that sound like Mr. Boodberg?

Brown: [chuckles] That sounds like Mr. Boodberg. It is connected with
his decision not to go back to China after he started teaching
here. He was from Russia and he had faced this problem himself.
This has happened to people over and over. Not to me, although I
guess I got pretty close.

A number of people seem to have stayed in Japan- -he says eight
years?

Lage: Yes.

Brown: There are a number of famous examples, such as Lofcadio Hearn, who
lived in Japan many years. He was an American, a distinguished man
in American literature. He went to Japan and loved it so well that
he continued to stay on and on. He married a Japanese wife and
became a Japanese citizen, but ended up a very unhappy man. He
never really made it as a Japanese, it is said, and resented it.
He never was fully accepted, and was very unhappy about it. There
are also cases of Japanese who have lived abroad a long time and
really got into troubles, psychological and cultural, that were
very difficult.

I can't say that I got into that trouble. I always considered
myself an American pretty deeply rooted in American culture. But I
have lived in Japan twenty years , much more than eight . After I
retired, I went over there for an additional ten years. When my
first wife, Mary, died in Japan, I was tempted to retire there. In
a sense, I suppose I was saying to myself that I would be more at
home retiring in Japan than in the United States. I mulled over

1 Elizabeth Huff, Teacher and Founding Curator of the East Asiatic
Library: From Urbana to Berkeley by Wav of Peking, Regional Oral History
Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1977, p. 149.

226

this question for several weeks before finally deciding to retire
in the United States.

Lage: Was this right at the time of the death of your wife that you had
these thoughts?

Brown: Yes. I had already decided to quit the Inter-University Center

Program just before she died. Then when she died, I wavered. The
question was, what do I do next? For months, I kept changing my
mind, but finally decided to return to the U.S.

Lage: Do you think that was the right decision?

Brown: Definitely. I think I would have faced the same problem that Hearn
and others had. You really can't make that kind of shift and be
happy with it. I think that is the reason I came back. It was the
right decision.

There is an awful lot about Japanese culture that would be
awfully hard to take. It was much easier for me as director of the
center. I had a job there, and an interesting job, with the title
of director. All Japanese seemed to have special respect for
anyone who held such a title. So it was an easy and pleasant way
to live. But as a retiree living there, I can see that it would
have been very difficult.

Lage: Yes. Well, we got out of our chronology, and I'm the culprit. But
that's very interesting, I think.

Asia Foundation as a Weapon Against Communism

Brown: We were talking about the Asia Foundation. Do you want me to go on
about that?

Lage: Was anti-communism mentioned in all of this? We are in the Cold
War here.

Brown: Anti- communism was not simply mentioned, it was a powerful

ideological force that accounted for the willingness of the U.S.
government to fund such an operation, as well as for the tendency
of many observers to think of the Asia Foundation as one of the
weapons that the U.S. was using in its attack on (or defense
against) the spread of communism. But after hearing what the
foundation was doing, and how, I saw it not as a weapon against
communism but as an arm of support for democratic ideals: free
political choice, religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of

227

the press, educational freedom, free trade, equal human rights, et
cetera.

Lage: But since the Asia Foundation was financed by the American

government, wasn't there a tendency to brand its programs as
government-supported attacks against communism?

Brown: Yes, both the leftists and the rightists tended to see the
foundation's programs in that light.

The leftists (those sympathetic to communist ideas and
practices) were consistently critical of any government-supported
activity that either attacked communism or backed democratic
alternatives. Rightists, on the other hand, were so preoccupied
with striking down the communist enemy that they not only endorsed
support for democratic alternatives (and direct military action)
but tended to think of foundation programs as non-military weapons
against communism. Such views from both the left and the right
were made more plausible by the political and intellectual anti-
communist climate of that day.

Even within the foundation itself, some individuals were prone
to value a given foundation program more for its anti-communist
thrust than for its support of democratic values, such as freedom
and justice. I well remember a heated exchange that occurred at a
meeting of Asia Foundation representatives in Hong Kong when I made
an impassioned plea that we concentrate on what adds strength to
the free way of life, not on what undermines the communist system.
In making this pitch, I recall characterizing the former approach
as a positive one arising from confidence in the power and popular
appeal of liberalism, and the latter as a negative approach
produced by the fear that communism would prevail. At the close of
that meeting, I remember James Stewart, vice president in charge of
foundation operations, making a concluding remark that went
something like this: "Our approach should be characterized by
health, not stealth."

Assisting Refugee Chinese Intellectuals

Lage: What were some of your programs of health?

Brown: There were many about which I wrote long reports and made

recommendations for financial support. I do not have copies of
those documents and therefore can not give you names, dates, and
monetary amounts. But I do remember getting the foundation to
approve liberal financial backing for three importart programs

228

initiated by refugee Chinese intellectuals. The first, and
probably the most significant, was helping (with money) a group of
refugee Chinese scholars to found a new Chinese college. I
remember calling Jim Stewart in San Francisco and gaining his
approval for the purchase of a building, at a cost of $100,000 Hong
Kong, that was to be used by the new college as a student
dormitory. By obtaining such support, the new college gradually
became strong and has become Hong Kong's leading Chinese
university. We also helped a big book store, a motion-picture
company, a research center, and a publishing house (all recently
founded by Chinese refugee intellectuals) to become thriving
institutions .

Knowing that we were putting a considerable amount of money
into educational programs, Professor John Fairbank of Harvard
University urged me to recommend support for the Hong Kong
University, a British institution. He was a friend of the
Englishman who headed the university. As I recall, John and his
wife were even staying in the chancellor's official residence at
that time, and saw to it that Mary and I were invited to an elegant
dinner there. But I could not recommend support for a British
university. That would have been a violation of the established
principle that we should limit our support to free Chinese
institutions created and operated by Chinese people. I don't think
John understood why I could not recommend support for the Hong Kong
University. He seemed to resent what I had to say--he was never
again as friendly toward me as he had been.

Lage: I suppose you had many persons coming to you with proposals that
you could not justifiably support.

Brown: Yes, almost every day. But I had on my staff a Mr. Yu who was a
very knowledgeable and reliable Chinese intellectual refugee who
helped me to avoid such traps. He and others helped us to make
certain that we were giving careful consideration only to proposals
made by individuals or groups that had already started a store,
company, institute, or college and only needed a little more help
to make that organization a viable and effective cultural
enterprise.

The Openness of the Chinese People

Lage: In your year and a half in Hong Kong, did you feel that you learned
much about the Chinese and their culture?

229

Brown: Yes and no. I met and talked with a number of Chinese

intellectuals, especially those associated with programs we were
supporting. But since it was foundation policy not to interfere
with, or attempt to control, organizations to which we were giving
financial help, I did not see much even of the distinguished
Chinese historian who founded the emerging Chinese University. But
just by living in Hong Kong for a year and half --with our two
children in British schools, with two or three Chinese live-in
servants, and with my daughter and I studying Cantonese together--
we could not but get a certain sense of how Chinese attitudes and
beliefs differed from those of Americans and Japanese.

Lage: For example?

Brown: I was both surprised and delighted to find how open and outgoing

the Chinese were. That was not something that I had read in books
or heard in lectures but something that hit me, day after day, in
all sorts of contacts with Chinese individuals.

One day I was driving my car down one of the main streets in
downtown Hong Kong when a middle-aged Chinese woman ambled out in
front of me, apparently unaware of an approaching car. Instead of
blowing the horn at her (which was what was normally done there), I
reacted in a Berkeley fashion: stopped and waited until she got out
of the way. Then just as she was right in the middle of the
street, and was about ten feet in front of me, she suddenly saw my
car. She was, of course, startled. But what she did then was
truly startling and surprising to this foreign visitor. She did
not jump, run, or scream but simply stopped, looked at me, and
laughed. Her laughter was so hearty that I laughed too. So here
was a "close call" that produced not an expression of fear or anger
but laughter by us both, and without either of us ever saying a
single word. I couldn't believe it, and I still can't. [laughter]

Lage: I suppose you have other stories like that.

Brown: Oh, yes. I would like to add one about our daughter Charlotte,

which tells us something about that open and outgoing character of
the Chinese people. (Charlotte, by the way, had come to like
living in Hong Kong, had some good friends, and did not want to
leave Hong Kong when we moved to Tokyo in 1954 . ) One day she came
home from school with three or four girlfriends and announced that
she had invited them for lunch. Mary was taken aback because
Charlotte had said nothing to indicate that she had any idea of
doing such a thing.

But our three live- in servants (one Cantonese man and two
female relatives) reacted quite differently. Instead of being put
out or irritated, they seemed delighted and happy to have the

230

opportunity to throw a party for Charlotte and her friends. One
dashed out to buy some things and the others set to work on a feast
that was served promptly, and in style, at the dining room table on
which they had spread our best silver. The girls were all pleased
by the luncheon. But we concluded that our three Cantonese
servants may well have been the most pleased of all, which was hard
for us to understand.

Lage: Did they speak English?

Brown: The man could do pretty well in pidgin English, and most

communication was through the man. But Charlotte and I also talked
to them in Cantonese, which also told us something else about
Chinese behavior. Since I had already spent several years in Japan
where I had worked pretty hard on the language and was seizing
every opportunity to use it, I had become accustomed to a definite
reticence (if not downright refusal) of a Japanese who knew English
to talk with me in Japanese. But this was not how the Chinese
reacted to our attempts to speak Cantonese. Instead of being put
down by an assumed charge that their English was deficient, they
were delighted to speak to foreigners in Cantonese. It did not
seem to matter that the level of communication had dropped to a
pretty low level or that it might have come off better in pidgin
English. Indeed, after trying out our Cantonese on our Cantonese
male servant (he was more like a butler) , we found him initiating
conversations in Cantonese. All Chinese that we met seemed pleased
to find that a foreigner was studying and using his language,
whereas most Japanese who have studied English (and the study of
English in Japan is required during a major part of one's secondary
education) are so bent on using their English that they tend to be
unresponsive to a foreigner speaking in Japanese.

Life in Hong Kong

Lage: Is there anything else you would like to say about your year and a
half in Hong Kong?

Brown: I do feel impelled to admit that we were really not living among

the common Chinese people of that British colony. To be sure, our
work was mainly with Chinese refugee intellectuals. But I had
virtually no contact with the thousands of poor Chinese who had
fled to Hong Kong from mainland China, most of whom were living in
hovels that could be seen all over the mountain slopes behind Hong
Kong. I did walk up and down the muddy paths of such a settlement
once or twice, and saw the filth and smelled the stench in which
those miserabl' people lived. But my contact with them was limited

231

pretty much to beggars that pestered us for a handouts and "look-
see" boys who wanted to "protect" our parked car, and who were
likely to see that something bad did happen, such as having gum
pressed into keyholes, if they were not employed.

I should admit that our life in Hong Kong was more like that
of British colonials who had dominated the political, economic and
social life of the Chinese on that island ever since it had been
taken from the Chinese at the end of the Opium War in the middle of
the nineteenth century. Indeed, for the first six months or so of
our stay in Hong Kong, we lived in a grand apartment on the Peak
that was rented from a British business executive who had returned
to England for home leave. So we inherited his three live-in
servants, used his plush furnishings, and went to and from downtown
below in our chauffeur-driven "limousine" (a new Dodge).
Occasionally we would ride the tram that is still used by tourists
must go to the Peak and who walk the path around the Peak to see
the spectacular views of one of the world's most beautiful harbors,
right up there with San Francisco and Sydney.

Not only that, the foundation office was a plush penthouse
apartment with several big rooms, a good air-conditioning system,
and a tennis court. It was used for Charlotte's birthday party,
which was well attended, well supplied with food, and well
entertained with live music.

As the foundation's representative there, I received a much
higher salary than at Berkeley, had several juicy perks (such as a
chauffeured car), and traveled first class at foundation expense.
Our social life was largely with high officials and their wives of
the U.S. Consular Service or the Hong Kong government, or with
wealthy Chinese couples who were parents of Ren's or Charlotte's
school mates. We were definitely not commoners working and living
among ordinary Chinese people and therefore did not experience, or
learn much about, the life of the ordinary Chinese man or woman.

Lage: You must have met some very interesting people.

Brown: We did indeed. I should have been keeping a journal then, but I
wasn't. I can remember meeting and talking with a distinguished
woman writer who had just written a novel based in Hong Kong, but I
cannot now remember her name or the title of the book she had
written. I do recall meeting and talking with such distinguished
visitors as Max Lerner, as well as with the current Hong Kong
reporters for the New York Times and Time magazine. And in
addition to having that talk with Vice President Nixon, we attended
receptions for such dignitaries as a U.S. senator and Eleanor
Roosevelt.

232

I will never forget such episodes as the following. One, our
entire family sailing around the island of Hong Kong in a
twenty- four foot yawl owned and operated by the foundation's
assistant representative, Tom Scott. Two, Mary's and my overnight
boat trip to Macao where we saw armed communist guards on duty a
hundred yards or so away, had some first-hand experience with
Portuguese colonial rule, and visited a casino where gambling was
about as intense and serious as in Reno. Three, my many pleasant
games of golf as a member of the Hong Kong Golf Club, which had a
short course on Hong Kong itself for a bit of golf after work or
over the weekend, as well as two eighteen-hole courses located
north of Kowloon close to the border of communist China where we
would spend a whole day playing a game and sharing good food and
drink at the fancy clubhouse.

Fourth, dinner parties at the famous Hong Kong Press Club
where I heard the foundation's representative in Thailand tell
about seeing, and becoming personally involved in, a fire-walking
ceremony one night in the outskirts of Bangkok. Fifth, attending
(with our friends Beth and Jimmy Turner who were visiting us)
ceremonies associated with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, when
Ren and one other American student in the Hong Kong public school's
first grade objected to the principal's decision to skip singing
"God Save the Queen" that morning because there was so much to do.
Sixth, being awakened one Sunday morning, at about six in the
morning, when our Chinese neighbor was celebrating his birthday by
setting off a string of five-inch firecrackers that began at the
top of his six- or seven-story building and ended at the ground.
Never had our ears been pierced with such noise for such a long
time, and it was really unnerving to be awakened in that way at
that early hour. Charlotte said she woke up dreaming that a
bulldozer was falling from the Peak into the harbor below.

With the Asia Foundation in Tokyo. 1954-1955

Lage: When you became the foundation's representative in Tokyo, I suppose
you faced an entirely different situation.

Brown: Yes, very different. In Japan, I was not dealing with Chinese

intellectuals who had escaped from communist control but Japanese
intellectuals who had been cramped or stifled by years of
authoritarian military control and by the miseries and
impoverishment attending a disastrous military defeat. In Hong
Kong, many schools, publishing houses, and motion-picture studios
had come under communist control, but not in Japan. Although the
influence of Marxist thov.ght could >e -eadily detected in scholarly

233

publications in several fields of Japanese learning and
communication, direct communist control was not that extensive or
serious. What concerned officials of the Japan Foundation was that
educational, communication, and entertainment activities had been
restricted and stifled, first by years of ultranationalistic
control and then by poverty and deprivation.

Lage: Why did you decide to go to Tokyo right after your year and a half
with the Asia Foundation in Hong Kong?

Brown: There were several interrelated factors that Mary and I discussed
at some length before deciding to move to Tokyo if the department
and university decided to make another exception to its sabbatical
leave policy. I would never have accepted the offer to go to Japan
if that meant severing my ties with Berkeley.

Lage: Did you consider giving up your career as a historian?

Brown: Toward the end of my year in Tokyo, the Asia Foundation's president
asked whether I would consider a permanent appointment with the
foundation as its vice president. Mary and I did some thinking
about making a change at that time, but I was not interested enough
to ask about the duties and salary of the proposed position. As
exciting as it was to work with prominent intellectuals and
government officials in various countries of Asia, figuring out how
U.S. money could and should be used to strengthen free and
democratic cultural activities, I had experienced great
satisfaction (even joy) from doing research and teaching in
Japanese history at Berkeley. There I could dig freely into any
aspect of Japanese history that interested me and work with
distinguished scholars studying Japan in other disciplines. I
could not and would not give up my career as a history professor at
Berkeley. So I gladly returned to the campus at a much lower
salary with no perks, no say over how to use large sums of U.S.
money, and no meetings with the high and mighty of either Asia or
the U.S.

Promoting Democratic Education

Lage: What sorts of programs did the Asia Foundation support in Japan
while you were its representative?

Brown: Many programs had already been started and developed by a staff
that included two distinguished Japanese writers, an able and
efficient administrative assistant (Mary Walker, who had been
registrar at Mills College), two American assistant representatives

234

(one was Dick Heggie, who later became a foundation representative
in other countries, director of the World Affairs Council of
Northern California, and mayor of Orinda) , and my predecessor Noel
Bush, who had been with Time and written a good book on Adlai
Stevenson.

Probably the most interesting and significant program, which
was just getting started and needed attention, was in the field of
democratic education. This was headed by distinguished scholars of
different disciplines who had decided that like-minded educators in
key universities around the country should get together regularly
to sponsor the publication of books and a magazine—as well as to
organize numerous speeches and panel discussions—on the nature,
meaning, and development of free and democratic education. By the
time I arrived, an organization called the Association for
Democratic Education had been set up by these distinguished
educational leaders, and plans had been laid for establishing
branches in various educational centers around the country. I
immediately became involved, as did others on the staff, in
meetings with Japanese leaders of this lively and promising
program. It is apparently still going strong and has been an
important factor in a gradual but definite turn toward liberal and
democratic values, away from authoritarian ones. When I was in
Japan as director of the Inter-University Center for Japanese
Language Studies about twenty- five years later, I discovered that
some of the scholars I had been associated with as the Asia
Foundation's representative in Japan were still active in the
association's program, and at least one had become a distinguished
university president.

Acquiring English Publications for Japanese Libraries

Brown: Two other programs, both of which were started during my year with
the Asia Foundation in Tokyo, were important and interesting enough
to remember. One was a book program centered on acquiring early
editions of scholarly English publications. These were collected
and distributed, without cost to recipients, to college libraries
around the country. These libraries wanted American scholarly
studies but could not, in those economically depressed times,
afford to buy them. The idea of doing this was first suggested to
me by Professor Shannon McCune, the brother of Professor George
McCune, a specialist in Korean history who was my colleague at
Berkeley until his early death a few years before. Shannon had
been collecting and distributing early editions of books on his
own, and had discovered that there was a great thirst and need for
such scholarly books, especially in the social sciences and

235

humanities. So I recommended that the Asia Foundation take up
Shannon's program and expand it by making a methodical check of
university libraries and publishing houses all over the United
States.

At least one person in the San Francisco office began devoting
full time to such work, soon discovering that there were two major
sources of early editions. The first was undergraduate libraries
at American colleges and universities that customarily purchased
numerous copies of books required reading for students enrolled in
introductory courses. Then when a new edition came out, only the
new edition was required reading, leaving the library with the
problem of what to do with all those copies of an earlier edition
that nobody ever checked out. Librarians apparently could not even
get enough money for these early-edition books to pay the cost of
getting rid of them. They were therefore delighted to have the
Asia Foundation take those books, especially since they were to be
given to impoverished Japanese students and teachers. One big
library after another began storing up all early-edition copies of
all textbooks- -even in physics, chemistry, and medicine- -which were
then picked up by an Asia Foundation truck for shipment to Japan.

The second source was large publishing houses that wanted to
reduce storage costs by getting rid of books that were not selling:
often old editions but sometimes first editions that were being
purchased only by libraries.

The Asia Foundation would bear the dollar cost of having all
these thousands of books picked up and sent off to San Francisco
for shipment. In Japan, too, the foundation bore the yen cost of
making sure that the right books were sent to the right libraries
in different parts of the country. We had at least one person in
the Tokyo office who spent all his time receiving, sorting, and
sending books to libraries scattered throughout Japan. And the
demand for such books continued to increase. By the time I left
Tokyo, the Asia Foundation was becoming widely known and greatly
appreciated for its generous book program.

Soon Asia Foundation representatives in other Asian countries
began requesting that the book program be extended to their parts
of Asia, which was done. Consequently, when I was in San Francisco
a year or two later, I saw a huge storehouse that was used for
receiving, sorting, and shipping early-edition books to several
different countries of Asia. It was amazing to see what a big
operation had emerged from Shannon McCune's idea and experiment.
Possibly it was because of the success of that program that led the
president of the Asia foundation to approach me about becoming vice
president.

236
Encouraging the Employment of American English Teachers in Japan

Brown: The second program started while I was in Tokyo was a rather modest
English-teacher program. Quite early much attention had been given
by the Asia Foundation and other U.S. agencies to helping Japanese
teachers of English to travel and study in the United States. But
little or no attention was being given to American students who
wanted to teach English in Japan and thereby gain an opportunity to
learn something firsthand about the language and culture of that
country. My own experience teaching English in Japan had led me to
feel strongly that this was a particularly good way to build
bridges of understanding between the peoples of two entirely
different cultures. So I recommended, and the foundation approved,
the appointment of three recent university graduates of American
universities to teach English at three Japanese universities.

The three young men selected were good choices. They made a
good impression at the schools where they taught, and they learned
enough about Japan and the Japanese language to become specialists
on Japan either in American government offices or American schools.

But the program's total payoff included the influence it
exerted on other foundations and on both Japanese and American
funding agencies. First the U.S. -Japan Fulbright Commission began
using some of its money for the employment of American English
teachers, and more and more schools were managing to hire foreign
teachers on their own. A few years later the Asia Foundation quit
using any of its money in this way. But the modest trickle of
young Americans going to Japan for one-year stints of teaching
English to college students (as well as to Japanese college
teachers of English) gradually developed into a flood. At present
the Japanese government itself gives, every year, rather generous
grants to around 800 recent American college graduates who teach
English at Japanese schools during a full academic year.

In the 1980s when I was director of the Inter-University
Center for Japanese Language Center in Tokyo, I did something else
that may have helped to turn that trickle into a flood. That was
done when the Asahi newspaper set up a panel discussion between
leading Japanese educators. It was to be publicized in newspapers
and over the air. In addition to including Japan's minister of
education, and prominent presidents of outstanding Japanese
universities, the organizers of the program invited Mike Mansfield
(then U.S. Ambassador to Japan) to participate. Mike (I dare to
call him by his first name since he called me Delmer) said that I
was the one who should be invited to participate in the program,
which was to be entirely in Japanese. So I got the invitation and
appeared before floodlights and microphones to talk with famous

237

Japanese educators — in Japanese—about "internationalism in
Japanese education."

The main point of my remarks was that a regrettable
educational imbalance (not just a trade imbalance) existed between
our two countries. I noted and deplored the fact (which I could
back up with information obtained as director of IUC and as a
member of the U.S. -Japan Fulbright Commission) that there were
roughly eight times as many scholarships granted to Japanese
students for study in the United States as for American students to
study in Japan. I fielded several questions about this and felt
that everyone present recognized that such imbalance was
educationally undesirable. Therefore when the Japanese government
announced, a few months later, that a huge number of fellowships
were to be offered yearly to foreign students (mostly Americans) to
teach English in Japanese schools, I could not help feeling that my
remarks had had some influence, although I am sure many others had
made the same point both before and later.

Appreciative Reception for the NBC Orchestra in Japan, 1954

Lage: You outlined the book program that was started at that time. That
would have been one of the things that you sponsored as well?

Brown: Yes, and there were some other projects that I will not forget.

One was the Asia Foundation's part in the first postwar appearance
of a distinguished American symphony orchestra, the famous NBC
orchestra which became known for concerts broadcast nationally on
radio. Japan's leading newspaper, the Asahi, got the idea of
having that orchestra brought to Japan. Being the leading
newspaper, it had no trouble raising the money needed to fly the
entire orchestra to Japan for a series of concerts in cities all
over the country. But because the Japanese government was then
restricting the use of yen for the purchase of dollars, the Asahi
could not purchase enough dollars to cover the cost. So they came
to the Asia Foundation for financial assistance. Since the Asahi
was not one of the free and democratic institutions that needed
financial assistance, we had to think of some way to funnel some of
the income from the sale of tickets to institutions that needed
help. I have forgotten the details of the plan we devised, but it
involved an agreement by which the Asahi would provide free, or
nearly free, tickets for good but impoverished student
organizations.

Since we had worked with the Asahi newspaper (and with
officers at the American emb.-.ss; as well) in developing this

238

program, Mary and I received tickets (I hope we paid for them) to
attend the first concert given at the Hibiya Hall in Tokyo. It was
an unforgettable concert, not only because the music was good but
because the hall was packed with Japanese who were wildly excited
by what they were hearing. And the orchestra did the right thing
at the right time by having the musicians stand up and play the
Japanese national anthem Kimigayo. This shocked and stirred
everyone present, even Americans like us.

I say "shocked" because we suddenly realized that although
this was music that we had heard many times in the past, it was
seldom heard during the seven or eight years that had elapsed since
the end of World War II. That was because General MacArthur and
the Allied occupation had properly linked that song with Japanese
nationalism, which had become rampant before and during the war and
which the occupation was doing its utmost to dampen, especially
since it was generally assumed that this song had been associated- -
in the hearts and minds of all Japanese individuals --with Japan's
aggressive war against the Allied powers. It was, in other words,
linked with Japan's religious nationalism, then commonly referred
to as Japanese "ultranationalism. " During my six years in Japan
before the war we seemed to hear it constantly, day or night. We
heard it whenever the school had a gathering of any sort: whether
celebrating a holiday, gathering for a sports event, or simply
going out on something akin to a school picnic. And whenever we
walked down any street at any time of the day or night, we were
sure to hear the song being played over one blaring radio after
another. Most foreigners became rather sick of it, largely because
it was always played so loud over speakers that seemed to transform
the song into screeching noise. But for the Japanese, hearing and
singing Kimigayo was being a Japanese. It must have given them a
sense of meaning in those years of disastrous military defeat.

But here in 1954, after seven or eight years of occupation
when the song (and everything associated with it) was frowned on,
it was almost never heard. And here, all of a sudden, and from the
instruments of this famous foreign orchestra, came that song,
played in an unbelievably beautiful way. Everybody stood up and
seemed about to cry. And when it was over, the applause was
deafening. From then on, the music seemed to get better and better
and everyone in the audience to become more and more delighted with
what they were hearing.

At a reception held after the concert, Mary and I talked with
several individual members of the orchestra who were of course
pleased and moved by the appreciative reaction of their audience.
One man made this interesting and significant remark: "Because of
that appreciative response, we have never played better." And
judging from the newspaper reports of subsequent concerts given in

239

major cities of the country, they continued to play well to one
full house after another, until the very end of a tour that must
have lasted more than a month.

I could not but feel good about having recommended the grant
of a fairly large amount of money (in the neighborhood of $100,000
as I recall) that made it possible for the Japanese people to hear
some good music by a distinguished American orchestra. In order to
understand just how much this orchestra was appreciated, we need to
remember too that, for years, the Japanese had not been simply
deprived of hearing their national anthem played properly but had
not been hearing that much music at all, good or bad.

To understand what that meant we need to recall too that a
very large number of Japanese individuals had developed a taste for
Western music, which is quite different from traditional Japanese
music played on such traditional Japanese instruments as the
samisen, the shakuhachi , and the koto. Although Japanese music was
delightful—even to this foreigner who is not very musical—many
Japanese individuals—even in prewar years— were spending much of
their time and money listening to Western music, especially
symphonies. I remember being quite impressed that one student
after another told me how many times (often as many as twenty) he
had gone to see and hear Diana Durbin in the movie entitled One
Hundred Men and a Girl. I also recall that coffee shops, even in
that distant city of Kanazawa, were frequented by students because
at these coffee shops records of music composed by Mozart,
Beethoven, or other distinguished Western composers were played.
Having seen such evidence of a lively and growing interest in
Western music, I could easily understand the popular appeal of the
NBC concerts, and such later developments as the emergence of more
than twenty symphony orchestras in Tokyo and the rise of famous
Japanese musicians in various forms of Western music.

Lage: Do you remember what symphony it was?

Brown: It was called the NBC Symphony.

Lage: Not connected with a particular city?

Brown: No, not at that time.

Director of the California Abroad Program In Japan. 1966-1969

Lage: You have been mentioning the IUC. Why was it set up and who was
behind it?

240

Brown: Before we get into that, I think I would like to talk about another
stay in Japan that came before my retirement from the university in
1978. This was a two-year stint, between 1966-69, as director of
the California Abroad Program [CAP] at the International Christian
University [ICU] in Tokyo. Later there were two additional
appointments, both of which came after I retired from the
directorship of the Inter-University Center in 1988.

Lage: Okay, let's take up that segment of your career which was, I

presume, one aspect of your being a professor of Japanese history
in the Berkeley history department.

Brown: It certainly was. Indeed, I was not on leave from the university

when serving as director of CAP between 1967 and 1969. I continued
to obtain my salary from the university while heading that program
in Japan and was even building up leave entitlement while I was
holding that job.

Lage: How did you get into CAP in 1967?

Brown: I had just finished my three-year term on the Berkeley Budget

Committee, ending with one year as chairman of both the Statewide
and Berkeley Budget Committees. I had been spending so much of my
time on matters outside teaching and research that I looked forward
to a time when I could become, once again, full-time involved in
Japanese history.

Lage: Why did you decide to accept the directorship rather than continue
on as a teacher in the history department?

Brown: I was consciously or unconsciously breaking away from two aspects
of university life that were pulling me away from research and
teaching, although I was of course continuing to write and offer
courses. The two pulls were Budget Committee problems and student
discontent. Both had absorbed much of my time and energy; and it
must have been because of my desire for a break from such interests
and concerns that led me to say later on (at a graduation speech at
the American School in the spring of 1978) "I fled from student
protests at Berkeley only to become involved in students protests
in Japan."

But there was also a positive side to my motivation: the
prospect of teaching and studying Japanese life in Japan. Although
I had many students in Berkeley who had spent some time in Japan,
and even some who had learned to speak and read the language quite
well, I missed the sense of immersion in Japanese life that comes
from living and working there.

La^e: How about thts program itself? Did it have an appeal?

241

Brown: Certainly it did. I had developed the urge to enter a career of
studying and teaching Japanese history because I had lived in the
country, not because of classes I took at Stanford, and so I was
sure that the education of American undergraduates would be greatly
enriched by a year of study abroad. I even came to feel that my
courses in Japanese history should be taught in Japan, not in
Berkeley. So the junior-year-abroad idea, which had emerged many
years ago in several colleges around the country, had a definite
appeal.

Lage: Did it turn out to be as exciting as you thought it would be?

Brown: More so. I say that because I witnessed, first hand, a remarkable
intellectual transformation in so many California students as a
result of their year in Japan. Of course the students who entered
CAP were not average students: they were admitted into the program
only if they had a B average. But I was amazed to find how many
moved, during their year in Japan, toward a career in which they
would continue to learn about the life of the Japanese people.
Some even decided to become professional learners in one discipline
or another. Three of my students went on to receive Ph.D. degrees
and to become professors: Bill Steele from the Santa Cruz campus
got his Ph.D. at Harvard and is now a professor of Japanese history
at ICU; Peter Wetzler received his Ph.D. under me at Berkeley and
is now teaching Japanese history in different colleges in Tokyo;
and the student from Hong Kong (whose name I cannot remember) got
his Ph.D. at Harvard and became a professor on the Davis campus of
UC.

Although it was very interesting to be lecturing on and
participating in discussions about Japanese history in classes of
students who were experiencing Japanese life first hand, I probably
gained even more satisfaction from teaching a small seminar for
undergraduates that included Bill Steele and the Chinese student
from Hong Kong. They both wrote papers on the history of a
Buddhist temple located right beside the ICU campus. They
immediately saw and appreciated the fact that they were into a
research project that was not going to be handled in the
traditional way: using books and articles in the library. Instead,
they went directly to the temple, met the priest, and asked him- -in
Japanese- -if he had any materials that they could use for exploring
the history of his temple.

The priest was both surprised and pleased. In all his years
at that temple he had not been approached, even once, by anyone
from ICU. And here he was being approached by two foreign students
who were asking questions in Japanese about the history of his
temple. Since no one had ever asked such questions, he did not
know how to reply. He was so intrigued by them and their pioject

242

that he wanted to do what he could to help. So he led them into
the temple's storehouse to see what they could find.

One thing they dug out was a century-old map of the
surrounding area. It showed who owned which parcel of land and
what was produced on it. The location of shrines and temples,
rivers and lakes, and roads and paths was also indicated. But for
some reason the map was cut up into dozens of pieces. But to the
delight and amazement of the two students, the priest offered to
let them take the pieces to the dormitory to see if they could
piece them together.

A few hours later, the students phoned to ask me to come to
their dormitory to see what they had found. They had spread the
pieces out on the floor of the main room in their dormitory and had
fitted them together. We were all excited by this old map. It
provided much valid evidence about the economic, social, political,
and religious life of that part of Japan a century or so ago.

Then we began trying to figure out how this kind of evidence
could be used. It was unlikely that the dozens of other students
living in that dormitory would allow them to monopolize the living
room floor for prolonged periods of research on an old, cut-up map
that, when pieced together, was around ten feet square. Someone
came up with the idea that it should be photographed, which would
be costly. I agreed to dig up the money.

I should have explained that different sections of the map
were in different colors, indicating something about the economic
or political character of each piece of land and adding greatly to
its value as a source of information about the Mitaka region one
hundred years ago. The photograph of the map, which was taken
after it had been pieced together, was large and clear enough to
make all the characters readable and the borders between different
types of land distinguishable. So it became a very important
source of information about various facets of life in that region
approximately one hundred years earlier.

When I was in Tokyo again last May (1996), I was invited to
deliver a lecture at ICU on The Great Goddess Amaterasu, and while
I was on campus I was taken by Bill Steele (then a senior professor
and dean at ICU) to the room where that picture still hangs. It
was a pleasure to see that it is still an honored possession. The
discovery of that map, the subject of that picture, was certainly a
high point in my two years of teaching at ICU, when two seminar
students got really excited about research with an on-site and
face-to-face character. That excitement may well have been a
factor in their becoming professional learners and university
professors: une at the International Christian University, and the

243

other at the Davis campus of the University of California. That
sort of thing did not happen often enough in CAP.

Lage: What do you mean?

Brown: I mean that not enough courses taught at ICU took California

students outside the classroom and library and into the homes and
institutions of the Japanese people. I felt that we were not doing
enough to make use of the opportunity to become engaged in on- site
and face- to- face learning. To be sure, there were some courses,
such as archaeology courses taught by Professor Edward Kidder in
which his students actually did some digging in archaeological
sites on the ICU campus. There were also courses in sociology that
required students to write papers based on personal interviews with
off-campus Japanese persons. But my impression was that most
courses in the humanities and social sciences were centered on
classroom lectures, required reading, and papers based on the use
of library materials, just as at home.

Lage: But that sort of teaching must be very hard and time-consuming.

Brown: That's right. And most courses at ICU are taught by Japanese

teachers whose students are Japanese, and who are committed (like
us) to the traditional lecture system.

Lage: Are you suggesting then that more CAP courses should be taught by
American teachers?

Brown: No. The UC policy is to have its year-abroad courses taught by the
teachers of the host country, and it's a good policy. Stanford's
is different. Most of its year-abroad programs are taught in
English by Stanford professors. I remember hearing Professor Peter
Duus say that his course in modern Japanese history at the Stanford
program in Kyoto was much like the one he offers at Stanford.

Lage: Then how can CAP do more to seize the opportunity of on-site and
face-to-face teaching, as you put it?

Brown: I doubt if anything more can or will be done, because we are too

much constrained by the traditional lecture system, as are the host
universities wherever CAP exists.

Lage: What might be done if there are no such constraints?

Brown: I remember being forced to work out an answer to that question when
two professors came to see me at the time I was director of IUC
during the 1980s. They were setting up a new junior-year program
for a group of midwestern colleges, and they were looking not only
for someone to head it but for ideas about how It should be set up.

244

Their questions led me to suggest a tutorial arrangement by
which a Japanese specialist in economics would serve as tutor of
undergraduate majors in economics. To make this tutorial approach
work, the tutor would have to have special qualifications. He or
she should not only be an economics scholar of some distinction but
rather good in English, for I was assuming that most American
undergraduates in the program will not be able to communicate on
economic questions in Japanese. The tutor should also have
imagination and compassion. Finding and training such tutors in
the fields of economics, sociology, anthropology, history,
politics, and art would be the main responsibility of the American
director, who should of course believe that the tutorial approach
is the best way for an American undergraduate to learn Japanese in
a hurry and to achieve some in-depth understanding of Japanese
economics.

I remember thinking of one particular economist who had become
a tutor at IUC at about the same time. He was Mr. Mutsuji Nakano,
a man I have known since he was a student of mine in Kanazawa, over
sixty years ago. After graduating from the Fourth Higher School in
Kanazawa and the Tokyo University, he began working for one of
Japan's leading brokerage firms. For six years he was head of that
firm's New York office. Then when he retired, he volunteered to
work with IUC students planning to use their Japanese in business
or in teaching economics at the university level. He was not only
an economist with a vast amount of experience in the world of
finance but had wonderful ideas about how a student might learn
more Japanese economic terms in a hurry; and he enjoyed meeting and
talking (always in Japanese, although he had a good command of
English) with his students outside the classroom. At least two of
his students have become economics professors at American
universities. One of them (Professor Michael Gerlach) became a
professor in economics at Berkeley. So I probably had Nakano in
mind when I was talking about the tutorial approach to learning
about Japanese life in a year-abroad program.

Lage: Were the two professors convinced that this was the way to go?

Brown: Yes, to such an extent that they asked if I would be willing to

give up my job in Tokyo and be the director of their new program.

Lage: But you refused?

Brown: Yes. I have often wondered if that was not a mistake.

Lage: Why?

Brown: That would have given me a chance to experiment with tutorial

teachin ; for year-abroad students in Japan. I was convinced, and

245

still am, that this would accelerate a student's mastery of
Japanese, especially the kind used in his major field, and add
excitement as well as depth and breadth to the learning process,

Lage: It's too bad you didn't take up the offer.

Social Life, Kyoto and Tokyo

Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

Yes, but I was also interested in the IUC program and, moreover, we
(especially Mary) were not that much interested in moving from
Tokyo to Kyoto.

Why was that?
in Japan.

Kyoto is often said to be the most interesting city

That's true, especially for persons drawn to Japan's ancient
culture. There is no other city in Japan where one finds living
cultural institutions with such deep historical roots. But we had
lived in Kyoto during most of 1975-76 when I was in Japan for
research. And that was a pretty hard year, particularly for Mary,
because we lived in a huge old house that was so poorly heated that
Mary became quite sick around Christmas time, just when we were
being visited by my sister Margie, her husband Jack, and my niece
Jacquie.

Since there were not many other Americans in Kyoto, our social
life was not nearly as interesting as in Tokyo where Mary belonged
to an amazing women's club called the Round Table, made up of
Japanese and foreign women who had traveled widely and whose
husbands held such important positions as ambassador, or chief
executive officer of some corporation with branches in various
parts of the world.

I can see that would be interesting. Do you have some story about
Mary's associations with members of the Round Table?

I have many, but there is one that I will never forget and that
comes to mind whenever conversation comes around, as it often does,
to computers and to Hewlett-Packard.

Once a year members of the Round Table had a party to which
their husbands were invited. At one of these, held at the
residence of some foreign ambassador to Japan, we were playing
bridge with a distinguished Japanese woman (who had studied in the
United States and who was the daughter of the head of the
Matsushita corporation) and her Japanese husband (who was the

246

current head of Matsusnita) . Because we had played a rubber rather
quickly and were waiting to move on to another table for a second
rubber, there was time for some conversation which I tried to start
by throwing in the comment that both Hewlett and Packard had been
classmates of mine at Stanford early in the 1930s.

I had known that Matsushita was associated with Hewlett-
Packard because I had seen a huge building near our house in
Ogikubo with the name Hewlett-Packard on a big signboard at the
front gate, preceded by the name of Matsushita. I had also heard
that there were at least a hundred of these Hewlett-Packard
buildings scattered around Japan, and that all were linked with
Matsushita headed by the husband of Mary's Round Table friend. I
felt quite sure that he would know all about those rich and
powerful American computer executives: Hewlett and Packard.

But to my surprise, he had to repeat their names two or three
times, and with a puzzled look on his face. Suddenly he said, "Oh,
yes, that is one of our operations, isn't it?" He was a pretty
bright and intelligent man. So I assume his slowness in
recognizing their names may have been due to unfamiliarity with my
American pronunciation of their names. Or (and this may be a
better explanation) his corporation was so big and powerful that
the Hewlett-Packard subsidiary was too small and insignificant to
come to mind quickly.

Japanese Student Revolt, 1967

Lage: That is interesting. What else do you recall from your two years
as director of the CAP in Tokyo in the sixties?

Brown: Two aspects of our lives during those two years added much zest,
and considerable trouble, to my position as director. First, we
lived in a house on campus and were involved in many different
facets of student life, not just classroom teaching. Second, the
first several months of our stay were made quite confusing, as well
as educational, by a student revolt that was far more violent and
disturbing than the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.

Lage: How did you get involved with these non-educational sides of
student life?

Brown: Because I was director of CAP, not just a visiting professor. As
director of a program in which approximately thirty- five UC
undergraduates were enrolled, I was responsible not only for seeing
that they received credits end grades at UC for courses taken at

247

ICU, but for handling such difficult problems as housing,
scholarship/loan payments, extending /renewing vias, and the
enforcement of dormitory rules.

Even now I shudder to think of all I had to do when a female
student arrived at the airport without a visa, and another time
when a boy was picked up for possessing and using drugs, which is a
very serious charge in Japan and over which I spent many hours
serving as the boy's interpreter while he was being questioned by
the police. Involvement with non-academic sides of student life
was also compounded by our living on campus where any student was
encouraged to drop in on us at most any time and for most any
reason. Both of us enjoyed such associations, and did quite a lot
to extend them, such as throwing big parties at Christmas and
Thanksgiving, and inviting students to stay with us when
recuperating from some illness. Moreover, we had a big house, a
live-in maid, and adequate air conditioning and heating. So all
this was a source of pleasure and joy, not complaints.

Lage: And how about the Japanese equivalent of the Free Speech Movement?

Brown: For several months that was what we lived with, day and night,
because that was when radical students "liberated" ICU's main
buildings. For months I was not even able to enter my office or
hold classes. I recall walking by one important building and
seeing a sign that read, "Dogs and communists not allowed!"

Lage: Why the antipathy to communists?

Brown: To the radical students who had seized control of the campus at

that time, the communists were not radical—they were "compromising
sissies" bracketed with dogs.

Lage: These were the radicals with whose leaders you arranged a meeting
with Professor Charles Sellers?

Brown: Yes, and I think Charlie was shocked with a radicalism that was

aimed, as they put it, at "destroying Japan's capitalistic control
system. "

Lage: Since you could not go to your office or classrooms, what did you
do?

Brown: Mostly we attended meetings. There were two types: negotiating

sessions between the students and the faculty, and meetings of the
faculty in which we tried to decide what position we should take on
the current student demand. These meetings were called Taishu
danko , or "mass negotiating session."

248

Lage: Did you participate in the mass negotiation sessions?

Brown: I attended every one of them, but all talk (negotiating) on the
faculty side was by the president or a dean, not by individual
members of the faculty.

Lage: Where did you sit? And what was the general layout of a mass
negotiation session?

Brown: Sometimes I sat on the stage of the auditorium. At other times I
sat in the auditorium seats with everybody else, which was always
packed with several hundred students and other people connected
with the university, such as faculty wives and secretaries.

Lage: What was the seating arrangement on the stage?

Brown: At the middle of the stage were two rather big tables in the shape
of a "T." At the table toward the back of the stage—the top of
the T--sat the student leaders. In the middle sat the head of the
radical group that had "liberated" the campus. He was the
moderator of the mass negotiating session, decided what was to be
negotiated, and who was to participate in the negotiation. He was
flanked by high-ranking officers of the student movement.

Then at the bottom of the T toward the audience sat other
student leaders on the left, and university officials on the right.
Seniority was represented by a person's position at the table: on
the faculty side the president sat closest to the table at the top
of the T, and the highest student officers (who were not at the
head table) sat opposite the president. Then behind the student
side of the table, other student leaders were seated, just as some
or all of the faculty were seated behind the table where the
president sat. As a foreign teacher, I was seated about as far
from the central table as I could get. And sometimes I would not
sit on the stage at all. But I attended every one of those
meetings, which usually began at one in the afternoon and lasted
until around nine or ten at night, every other day.

Lage: What was the general mood of these meetings? Was there yelling and
screaming?

Brown: No, I recall none of that, but these were very serious affairs. I
recall no laughter and no jokes. Every word spoken by anyone was
listened to and thought about. Every statement had been considered
carefully and was precisely worded. Indeed, the verbal
confrontation was so serious and prolonged that one faculty leader
after another got sick and was hospitalized, often leading to his
resignation from his post and to cancelling any further appearances
at a negotiating session.

249

Lage: Every day this would happen?

Brown: Every other day. In between we had faculty meetings, and the

students had their meetings, getting ready for the next negotiating
session.

Lage:

Brown:

What were the issues there?
States?

Anything like the issues in the United

Lage:

Brown:

Lage :
Brown:

Lage:

In both cases the students were objecting to actions and policies
of the administration. In the U.S., the students were objecting
mostly to actions that were considered to be violations of free
speech. But at ICU the issues tended to be in the area of tuition
costs and the cost of meals at the student dining room, although
complaints and demands were soon made about what the administration
had done or was doing in other areas.

So these seem to be all local issues having to do with the
university-student relationships, rather than with politics?

Yes, although the students had a lot to say and write about the
administration of the state. They seemed to see the university as
an arm of the state and as manifesting the evils of state control.
That is why that radical leader dared to tell Charles Sellers that
their aim was "to destroy the entire capitalistic control system."

I am inclined to think that in both the United States and
Japan student discontent at the local level was fed by deep social
concerns, such as those arising from the Vietnam War and the civil
rights movement in the United States. That is, the students were
striking out against all authority when they rose up against
authority at the university.

Did this have an effect on the university's administration?

It certainly did. There was a series of changes in deans and even
in the presidency. And these changes, in which even foreign
professors were involved, indicated to me that members of the
faculty seemed to have much more to say about the selection of a
new president than American professors do. This conclusion is
drawn from what I saw and experienced as a member of the faculty at
ICU at the time of their most serious student upheaval as well as
from what I experienced as a member of the Budget Committee (and
also has a member of the selection committee that recommended the
appointment of Chancellor Heyns) at Berkeley.

What did the faculty have to say about the selection of a new
president at ICU?

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Brown: Selection seems to have been made solely by the majority vote of
the faculty.

Lage: And you took part in such a selection at ICU?

Brown: Yes, I will not soon forget that occasion, a long faculty meeting
at which we were trying to decide which of two candidates for
president we should vote for. (It seems to have been generally
understood that ICU's board of directors would go along with the
faculty's majority vote.)

After hours of discussion, each one of us voted for the
candidate of our choice. When the votes were collected and
counted, we discovered that both candidates had received the same
number of votes. Whereupon, the president asked for three minutes
of silent prayer, after which we voted again. During the minutes
of silence, I changed my mind. I had at first voted for a man who
was a friendly and open-minded man that all foreign professors
liked. But during that period of silence, I came to the conclusion
that the other candidate—a man who was closer to the rebelling
students and rather cool toward foreigners and the international
dimension of ICU--would probably be a better president for ICU at
that particular time. And when the votes were again counted, the
man I voted for won by one vote. Others too may have changed their
minds, but I had the uneasy feeling that by changing my vote, I had
caused the more radical teacher to be elected president. I was so
uneasy about this that I never told anyone (except Mary) what had
happened during those few minutes of silence, especially since the
newly elected president's term of office was not that successful.

Lage: And you were in charge of the California Abroad Program, so what
happened with the students from California?

Brown: Since no classes were held for several months they were pretty much
on their own. The program collapsed while the strike was on. The
situation had seemed pretty bad in Berkeley, but classes continued
to be held. In Tokyo it was much worse: classes were not held for
several months. In Berkeley the problem was solved by compromise
and negotiation, but in Tokyo it was solved only with the
intervention of the police, who forced the students to leave the
buildings they had been occupying.

Lage: What a time. Did that change your outlook at all when you came

back to Berkeley? You came back to continued turmoil at Berkeley.

Brown: Yes. But the situation was entirely different here. I suppose the
experience in Japan made me feel that the compromise approach that
we adopted back in 1966 was the way to go. If both sides continue
to be angry and rigid, then a resolution can be achieved only by

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the use of force, which is especially deplorable at an institution
of higher learning.

Thoughts on Internationalism in Japan

Lage: You mentioned that you might have cast the deciding vote for the
election of the new president of the ICU, and that this made you
uneasy. Why were you uneasy?

Brown: Mainly because many Japanese felt foreign visitors should not have
the right to vote on such important personnel matters. If they had
learned that I had cast the deciding vote, the anti-foreign
movement would have been fueled, and the international character of
the International Christian University weakened.

Lage: Are you suggesting that the "International" in International
Christian University was not very strong?

Brown: I am. Throughout my two-year stay at ICU, I heard (and often
became involved in) discussions of questions such as "What is
internationalism?" or "Is ICU really an international institution
of higher learning?"

ICU was international in several respects. Not only was the
word "international" in its name, it had many foreign professors,
probably offered more courses in English than any other Japanese
university, had many Japanese professors who had studied in the
United States, required all students to take courses in English,
and was known to be the best place for a Japanese student to learn
about the outside world (especially the English-speaking part of
it). Nearly everything said in student and teacher meetings were
translated into English (if spoken in Japanese) and into Japanese
(if spoken in English). California students admitted to an ICU
dormitory were usually assigned to a room with three Japanese
students. And yet foreign students and teachers (not just American
ones) tended to feel--and frequently say--that there was more anti-
foreign sentiment on the ICU campus than at other Japanese
universities. This can not of course be proved or disproved, but
we constantly saw and heard things that seemed to support it.

For example, at the time of the student uprising, which was a
critical time in which feelings and behavior patterns appeared in
high relief, foreign students were excluded from all organized
student activity. Visiting foreign professors were always allowed
'o speak and were politely heard, but we got the impression (seldom
...f ever explicitly stated) that this was a Japanese problem that

252

should be handled only by the Japanese members of the faculty.
Then there was the disinclination of Japanese professors to
converse with a foreigner professor in Japanese, although some of
us had spent most of our lives working on the language. Moreover,
both foreign students and teachers seemed to find it easier to make
friends with Japanese not connected with ICU.

What seemed to be anti-Americanism was of course fed by the
fact that ICU was founded by grants of large amounts of American
money. Two other developments gave the institution a definite
American stamp: most of the American- style homes on campus were
built by American money for American professors; and such key
offices as vice president were for years held by American
professors. But by the late 1960s most of the financial support
was coming from the Japanese, not from Americans. So it was
logical that we saw signs of reaction against control and
domination, which we tended to interpret as a deterioration of
internationalism.

Lage: Were you wrong?

Brown: Yes, we were wrong, but also right. We were wrong in the sense

that internationalism (intellectual interest in all aspects of life
in other nations of the world) is probably stronger in Japan—and
probably is still stronger—than anywhere else in the world. No
country on earth translates so many foreign books into their native
language; no country on earth has as many of its citizens travel to
foreign countries; and I think no other country forces its students
to spend so much time on the study of foreign languages. Foreign
movies, foreign music (classical and jazz), foreign fashions,
foreign sports, and foreign studies in all disciplines probably
receive more attention than in any other country of the world.
Indeed, "internationalism" is in the air: every university, city,
company, and social organization seems to be doing its utmost to be
more international than its counterparts. After living in Japan
and hearing so much about the outside world on TV, I came to feel
that America is quite provincial.

Lage: So why do you say that internationalism was deteriorating at ICU?

Brown: Because anti-Americanism and nationalism, which was particularly
strong before and during World War II, appeared to be getting
stronger and internationalism (its polar opposite) weaker.

I remember getting into a discussion in the 1980s headed by a
professor of Tokyo University, and aired on radio, in which I came
right out and stated that internationalism was not very strong in
Japan. Of course that was difficult for my Japanese friend, a
specialist on American history at the Tokyo University, to take.

253

He therefore was quite interested in why I (and another foreigner
on the panel) took such a position. As I recall, my point was that
Japanese interest in foreign countries and foreign people was
superficial: that they were largely interested mainly in what they
could see (and take pictures of) and in what they could learn that
would help them increase to their profits, or write something that
would sell well. I think I also tried to say that the Japanese did
not seem to be trying to understand the ideas, feelings, and
beliefs of foreigners, or to become engaged in in-depth
conversations with the people of other nations. 1 had convinced
myself (but certainly not the Japanese to whom I was talking) that
their internationalism was not particularly strong, and was
becoming weaker.

Lage: Do you still think so?

Brown: Yes and no. I still think that internationalism in Japan does not
run very deep, but it probably runs deeper than in the Western
world. While in Japan I could see, and sometimes get upset by,
superficiality in Japanese interest in the outside world. But
after getting back home, I soon noticed that our interest—and
probably that of people in other parts of the western hemisphere-
is even weaker and more superficial than in Japan.

Lage: What made you realize this after returning home?

Brown: Probably the difference between the international outlook of Japan
and that of the United States was most clearly revealed when 1
returned home and became chairman of the board of outreach at my
church, the First Congregational Church at Berkeley. That board
was not only responsible for the church's outreach in Berkeley but
in the world outside. And having just returned from Japan, I began
to wonder if any of the money contributed to foreign missions was
being used for the support of the International Christian
University. So I made inquiries and found that although money for
foreign missionary work was declining sharply, some money was going
to the International Christian University.

So I got in touch with the ICU Foundation in New York. I even
wrote a letter, as the chairman of outreach, saying that I had just
spent two years at ICU and felt that we should not be spending
money on projects which were blatantly American, explaining that
there was an increasingly strong Japanese reaction to ICU's
American character. Dr. Hal Shorrock, who was then vice president
at ICU, recently sent me a copy of the letter that I wrote. He was
interested in, and in agreement with, what I had written. But the
ICU Foundation apparently was not, since I did not even receive a
reply. My guess is that the foundation officials in New York could
see nothing wrong witn g .fts that had an American stamp, and felt

254

that that was what induced Americans to continue supporting
missionary work in Japan.

Second Thoughts on Christian Missionary Work

Lage: Did your thinking about nationalism and internationalism affect
your thinking about the Christian mission?

Brown: Indeed it did. But my living in Japan, and especially my study of
religious change in Japanese history, had led me to question the
traditional missionary approach and even to doubt whether it should
be supported.

Since Mary's father (Dr. Charles A. Logan) and her uncle (Dr.
Harry Myers) had spent their entire lives as missionaries in Japan,
and since other relatives and friends were missionaries, I have
been continuously in contact with persons involved in Christian
missionary work within Japan. During the six years that we were in
Kanazawa, nearly all of our social life was with Americans (no more
than about a dozen) who were missionaries. And when we were
married at Lake Nojiri during the summer of 1934, nearly all the
hundred or so who attended the ceremony were missionaries. And
during our summer vacations at Lake Nojiri and Karuizawa, our
social life was mainly with missionaries. So my doubts about the
missionary enterprise arose on the edge of the mission field. And
having been a member of churches where we were constantly asked to
give pennies to missionaries who were "saving the heathens," I
should have been tuned to, and sympathetic with, the missionary
program.

The first jolt came when I discovered how well the
missionaries lived. Although I felt I was doing pretty well
(living in a three-bedroom house with a live-in maid), I soon
discovered that all the missionaries lived in much better homes and
in a rather grand style. Two missionary families in Kanazawa not
only had bigger and better houses but had their own tennis courts.
It was not quite the picture of missionary life that had been drawn
for me at church in the United States. But I finally got used to
that, but then began to wonder about "converting the heathens" when
hearing sermons preached by Dr. Logan and my friend Reverend Howard
Norman, a missionary in Kanazawa during much of our stay there.
Howard's sermons were rather scholarly and intellectual, but those
of Dr. Logan were really meant to convert.

I remember going once with Mary to hear him preach at a small
church in the mountains behind Tokushima on the Island of Shikoku.

255

Dr. Logan spoke Japanese very well; he spoke earnestly from a deep
Christian faith; he really liked Japan and the Japanese people; and
he had a great sense of humor. His sermons were delightful and the
crowds that came to hear him were entranced with everything that he
said.

But it was about that time that I began to wonder if it was
right for him and other missionaries to urge Japanese individuals
to tear themselves away from their ancient religious roots. And I
think that the more thoughtful missionaries, including Dr. Logan
himself, must have been wondering about this. It must have been
because of such doubts that Dr. Harper Coates, the missionary who
had preceded Howard Norman in Ranazawa, became engaged, with a
Japanese scholar, in writing a two-volume study of the life of
Honen (1133-1212), a great Buddhist reformer often compared with
Luther. Other missionaries who have lived and worked long in Japan
began to think less and less of converting the Japanese and more
and more of teaching them about Christianity and living the life of
a Christian in their midst. We all have come to realize that
religion is a core element of national identity and that becoming a
Christian for a Japanese is getting pretty close to denying his
Japaneseness. So I am afraid I have become rather lukewarm about
Christian missionary work, especially that of fundamentalist
churches that tend to reject not only all Japanese religious
beliefs but those of other Christian denominations.

Family Life and Research in Japan. 1960 and 1975-1976

Lage: Well, let's get back to the next periods of stay in Japan. What
were they?

Brown: Both before and after that two-year stay at ICU I was in Japan for
a year of research. The earlier one came in 1960 when I was in
Japan for research on a Fulbright research scholarship, and the
later came between 1975-76 when I was a humanities research
scholar. During neither of those year-long periods of research did
I have teaching and administrative responsibilities, although I
gave some lectures, and we met socially with both Japanese and
American friends.

During the 1960 stay Ren was with us, and Asakura-san (the
live- in maid and cook who had been with us in 1956 when I was with
the Asia Foundation) came to live with us, although she had
apparently not been working since that earlier year in Omori. I
have fond memories of Ren's excitements and experiences. He and
Auakura-san were very fond of each other. We recall that he often

256

came home with something to tell us about what had happened at
school. Before coming into to report to us, he would usually first
dash out to the kitchen to tell Asakura-san, in Japanese, what had
happened .

We often recalled the occasion when he went to dinner with us
and some Japanese friends to a downtown Japanese restaurant. While
we and the friends were still talking, Ren asked if he could go
home (across that huge city of Tokyo) alone. Our Japanese friends
were amazed that he would dare to do such a thing at the age of ten
or eleven, but they were more amazed that we would give our
permission. Both we and he were confident that he would have no
trouble. Sure enough, when we got home he was already there and
had fascinating stories about what he had seen and done on the
various trains and subways he had taken.

Ren also surprised us when the time came to go home to
Berkeley. He wanted to go alone by Japanese freighter, although we
had decided to return by air. We were a little slower to agree to
this, mainly because travel by ship was more expensive. But we
finally gave in. So we saw him off in Yokohama and met him in San
Francisco. When he yelled down to us from the upper deck, we were
surprised to hear that his voice had changed. On his way across
the Pacific, alone, he seemed suddenly to have become a man.

During that year I was asked to give a paper in Japanese
before a group of scholars at the Tokyo University. I recall
spending days and days on that lecture, having a Japanese friend
correct my Japanese and listen as I read it. Before that assembly
of Japanese scholars I seemed to be doing all right until I got to
page 23. There I had to stop because that page of the manuscript
was missing. I must have left it home. So I stopped reading,
reported that I was missing a page, and told them in my own
Japanese words what I had written on that missing page. I must
have been quite flustered but I was amazed to discover that my
audience suddenly became quite interested in what I was saying.
Not only that, when the time came for discussion, most questions
were about what I had said on page 23.

I do not think I ever again tried to deliver a speech from a
written manuscript, for that experience convinced me that reading
it, either in English or Japanese, does not arouse much interest.

Lage: How about your stay in 1975-76?

Brown: Most of my time that year was devoted to research connected with
the completion of Ishida's and my joint translation and study of
the G akansho . Social life was quite limited since we spent the
first part of the year in Sendai and the latter part in Kyoto,

257

where we stayed in a huge house (near Kyoto's Imperial Palace) that
was very hard to heat. We did have visitors from the United
States: first Yale and Helen Maxon came, and then my sister Margie,
her husband Jack and their daughter Jacquie were there for
Christmas. Helen attracted attention by painting pictures in the
garden of the Meiji Shrine. And my niece Jacquie--a beautiful high
school blond—created a community stir, especially among young
Japanese men in the neighborhood, when she went out to do the
shopping for Mary, who was in bed with the flu. Although Jacquie
knew no Japanese, she was always able to get all the help she
needed in buying groceries. We also had another niece, Jan, the
daughter of my sister Mary, in Kyoto that year. She was there as a
missionary teacher. We enjoyed several evenings with her and her
co-workers.

Director of the Inter-University Centers for Japanese Language
Studies, 1978-1988

Lage: Tell me more about the Inter-University Center for Japanese
Language Studies in Tokyo, and your directorship there.

Brown: I was at a meeting in New York back in 1959 when the establishment
of such a center was first talked about. It was called by
professors from Stanford University who had obtained a generous
grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the support of a Japanese
program that was proving difficult for Stanford alone to carry out.
So professors in Japanese studies from about a dozen American
universities met to discuss how the money might be used for the
advancement of Japanese studies in the United States as a whole. I
represented Berkeley.

We agreed that what was needed most was a year-long, intensive
program in Japanese at the advanced level, one that would make it
possible for our best graduate students to learn enough Japanese--
in Japan—to use it effectively in research and writing in any of
the several disciplines. Twelve universities were associated with
the program from the start. These included Harvard, Yale,
Columbia, Princeton, Chicago, Michigan, Vancouver, Washington,
Berkeley and Stanford. (I forget the other two; maybe they were
Cornell and UCLA.) All twelve had specialists in Japanese studies
and were training graduate students that were in dire need of
intensive Japanese-language training.

The program known as the Inter-University Center for Japanese
Language Studies (IUC) had a rather shaky beginning on the
International Christian University (ICU) campus, which was late.:

258

plagued by the student upheaval, of which I already spoke. The
upheaval in 1969 affected the program because the man who then
headed it was also ICU's vice president. He was too busy with
student affairs to give the IUC much attention.

The program was having so much trouble that the IUC governing
committee (made up of one professor from each of the twelve
universities) decided to appoint a new director: Kenneth Butler, a
young doctoral candidate in Japanese linguistics at Yale
University. He was a very energetic and imaginative director who
moved IUC to a building in Kiyoi-cho (near the Akasaka Hotel) in
downtown Tokyo, where it continued to be based for the next twenty
years. He also put together an excellent teaching staff and
outlined a program of intensive language instruction that has
continued to be used, without much change, down to the present day.

Lage: What was the program like?

Brown: Several basic principles were consistently and rigorously followed.
First, no teacher was ever to speak to any student in English, only
in Japanese. Second, all instruction was to be in small classes
(seldom more than five in a class). Third, the students were to be
drilled in all four forms of language use (speaking, hearing,
reading, and writing) but with special attention to speaking and
understanding what is heard. Fourth, each student was and is
expected to devote full time to language study, not only spending
most of every weekday in class but spending several hours before
class in preparation, listening to tapes for the next day's class.
Fifth, class sessions were based on the use of materials prepared
by the teachers, which introduced basic and commonly-used forms of
Japanese speech. Sixth, each student was urged to develop contacts
that would enable him or her to use Japanese constantly in social
situations outside IUC.

Lage: What was your position in it?

Brown: I was director of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language
Studies (IUC) for ten years between 1978 (the year of my
retirement) to 1988.

Lage: How did you get into it?

Brown: I got into that job immediately after retirement because Bill
McCullough, who then represented Berkeley on the IUC governing
committee, called to ask if I would be interested in serving as
director of IUC for one year while the committee was searching for
someone to take the job on a permanent basis. He explained that
Kenneth Butler had suddenly resigned and that the committee had not
had time to find someone 1 o replace him, adding that the committee

259

had agreed I should be asked to take the position for a year and
that I should be invited to go to Tokyo (at IUC expense) for a few
days to look at the situation before deciding whether to accept.
As I recall, Bill said that the committee felt I was well qualified
to fill the job, not only because I had been a regular professor at
one of the universities in the consortium but because I had had
considerable administrative experience as chairman of the history
department and was fluent in Japanese.

I did go to Tokyo for a look-see and I remember talking with
(or rather listening to) Kenneth Butler who was really upset by the
IUC governing committee's "acceptance of his resignation." Neither
he nor anyone else ever told me exactly what transpired at the
meeting at which his resignation was accepted, but he probably
said he would resign if certain demands (such as a higher salary)
were not met. And the committee simply decided that those demands
could not be met. In any case, Ken was quite angry, taking the
position that the future of IUC was hopeless because of its weak
and unreasonable governing committee. He was not at all helpful in
supplying information that would enable me to decide whether to
accept the appointment. Indeed, he said or implied that I should
not accept it—that the situation was so bad that neither I nor
anyone else could salvage the program.

Lage: Then why did you?

Brown: I was challenged. I knew that the program was important and felt
that I could keep it going, maybe even strengthen it. Moreover, I
attended a meeting in Hawaii with representatives of the three
funding agencies, each of which had been turned off by what they
felt was a sloppy and irresponsible way of handling the large
amounts of money each had been granting to IUC. I discovered that
there was no regular budget. So in my discussions with the three
representatives of the major funding agencies, I first assured them
of my intention to establish regular budgetary and accounting
procedures. Whereupon I obtained assurances of continued support.
So that meeting made me feel quite confident that I could keep IUC
going, and maybe strengthen it. I agreed to take the job for one
year.

Lage: Then why was it that you were there for ten?

Brown: I never agreed to stay for a ten-year term, but only decided, year
after year, to stay on one more year. That yearly decision was
made at the annual meeting of the IUC governing committee, always
held at Stanford in the spring. A number of decisions were made
then, including the selection of students for the following
academic year. But at each meeting the committee also had to
decide who would be appointed director for the following year. I

260

had become so excited by this program, and by associations with
bright and promising students from all over the English-speaking
world (every year we usually had at least one interesting student
from Australia, England, or Canada) that I kept saying, year after
year, "I am available for one more year."

Lage: Did you succeed in making IUC stronger?

Brown: To some extent, but not as much as I had hoped.

Lage: In what ways?

Brown: I did manage to set up regular budget and accounting procedures

that seemed to satisfy the foundations that their funds were being
spent carefully and wisely. Also I established a magic number (a
total-assets figure) which audited reports were geared to. A
precise account of all funds received and spent was extremely
difficult to get, not only because we received funds from several
sources but because we were also receiving dollar funds from
Stanford for yen-expenses in Tokyo. The exchange rate would
usually change between the time Stanford sent the money and the
time we received it in Tokyo. But we devised a system by which we
could figure out all these exchange gains and losses and create a
report, centered on the magic number, that the auditor used as the
basis of his calculations. That is, if all expenditures minus
expenses since the last report did not give him the magic number,
he knew that something was wrong. Establishing a magic number
target for each monthly report was applauded by the administrative
office at Stanford and, as I heard later, the Chinese Language
Center in Taiwan (also administered by Stanford) was pressed to
follow suit.

Immersion in Japanese Language for Professionals

Lage: How about the program itself?

Brown: I do not think I did much to improve that. Its basic strength lay
in excellent methods developed earlier by Ken and the Japanese
teachers who were quite outstanding, mainly because they were
enthusiastic, bright, and compassionate people who really liked to
help promising foreign students to speak Japanese correctly, and to
comprehend it fully when spoken by others .

But I think I did strengthen the program somewhat by urging
both teachers and students to begin, as soon as possible, using the
kind of Japanese spoken and written in a studeit'r chosen

261

profession. I remember helping and encouraging a medical student
to become associated with doctors in a clinic where research was
being carried out in the area of his special interest. After that,
he became more deeply involved in the study of Japanese, and I
began hearing high compliments from doctors associated with him.
In general, however, the teachers did not favor establishing such
professional connections, taking the position that it was more
important, at that early stage in the study of Japanese, to
concentrate on basic vocabulary and speech forms. But I gradually
convinced a few that early immersion in the language of the
student's chosen profession strengthened his enthusiasm for
language learning.

The experience of several individuals, as well as that of
myself and a German colleague in Kanazawa, convinced me that this
approach would pay high dividends. One young man's case (a man by
the name of Lambert) will not be readily forgotten. He had just
finished his A.B. in the Claremont College system and was planning
to enter law school as soon as he graduated from IUC. He had taken
the trouble to commute into Los Angeles for the study of Japanese
during the last two years of college, achieving results in Japanese
that (along with an academic record that made us quite certain he
would become a distinguished lawyer) led to his admission to IUC,
where most of the students admitted were already enrolled in some
graduate school. He had learned a lot of Japanese and had gained
admission because he had set his sights high and had worked hard.
It was therefore not surprising to have him say, when the program
was only three or four months along, that he would like to audit a
course at Tokyo University in the area of law in which he hoped to
become a specialist. The teachers were appalled that he should
even be thinking of such a thing: in their view he was still a rank
beginner in the language and, furthermore, even practicing Japanese
lawyers were not permitted to audit law courses at Tokyo
University. So when he came to me, he was discouraged and
disappointed.

During our conversation I suggested that he do the following:
(1) go to the law department of Tokyo University and find out which
professor was teaching his kind of law and was teaching a course
that he would like to audit; (2) check out and read a Japanese
article or two published by that particular professor; (3) go to
that professor's officer during his scheduled office hour,
introduce himself properly in Japanese, and explain that he is
making an intensive study of Japanese in order to use that language
in dealing with Japanese clients; and (4) ask for his advice on
what he might do to learn that kind of Japanese as quickly as
possible, without ever mentioning a wish to audit his course.

262

Before the lapse of three days (probably before he had had
time to do any reading of any legal articles written in Japanese),
he came rushing back to my office to say that the idea had worked.
He went on to say, with great excitement, that he had found the
lawyer who was teaching just the kind of law he was most interested
in, had gone to his office hour, had introduced himself in
Japanese, and had asked for his advice about what to do to learn
more of the kind of Japanese in a hurry. He reported that the
professor was very friendly and, after a few questions and
comments, said, "Probably the best thing to do is to audit my
class, and become acquainted with other students taking it." That
was just what he wanted to hear. He became so intent on attending
that class at Tokyo University and socializing with Japanese law
students that he missed some classes and assignments at IUC,
probably convincing the teachers that they had been right to reject
his idea of auditing a law course at Tokyo University.

But I was convinced that learning the kind of legal Japanese
he would need as a practicing lawyer made him a far more
enthusiastic student of the language. I do not know what happened
to him after his graduation, but I feel quite sure that he obtained
his law degree and has become a successful attorney with a number
of Japanese clients who would prefer to take up American legal
problems with an American lawyer who can discuss those problems in
Japanese.

Because of what happened to Lambert, and to several other men
and women, I think Japanese instruction at IUC has come to place a
heavier accent on early submersion in the language of a particular
student's chosen profession.

Trying to Develop Interactive Computer Programs for Language
Study

Lage: You suggested or implied that you failed to gain acceptance of some
other ways to strengthen the IUC program. What were they?

Brown: One was the idea that study should be focused on the mastery of

Japanese idiomatic expressions. A wide range of Japanese written
and spoken texts were used at IUC that included numerous idiomatic
expressions. But I felt that while these introduced a student to
such forms , and permitted him to get a feeling for what they meant ,
it did not assure mastery of their use in a wide range of
situations. I did convince one or two teachers that such an
approach might produce good results; and I and my associate
director, Professor Kiyoko Takagi, set to work placing on computer

263

a rather exhaustive list of idiomatic expressions built around key
verbs. But that job was never finished (I still have printouts of
all that was done). No teacher had the time or desire to complete
the list or to use it as a basis for interactive computer programs
aimed at enabling a student to master the use of linguistically
related idioms. So that effort was not successful.

Lage: And was there something else?

Brown: Yes, I became convinced that each student could learn more Japanese
in less time if he were to be or she were to become immersed in
self -study by computer. I had seen enough elementary language
lessons on computer to realize that such study could be made more
interesting if the study of vocabulary and grammar were to take the
form of interactive games. The value of that approach, especially
for the highly motivated learner, has been demonstrated in other
languages and at the beginning level in Japanese. But the market
for a program at the advanced level, and in the various
professions, is so limited that computer companies are not willing
to spend a lot of money in developing such programs. I did manage
to get a couple of young teachers to begin working on building such
a program, but it was so time-consuming (and they were so busy with
their teaching) that they did not press on. I felt certain that we
could pick up foundation support for an imaginative computer
program, but not enough preliminary study and experimentation was
ever done to submit a proposal. And then my wife got sick, and I
decided not to take the directorship for the eleventh year.

I wrote an article in Japanese on the subject, which attracted
considerable attention. And I even approached a Japanese linguist
on the Berkeley campus about computerized interactive programs for
the study of Japanese at the advanced level. But he was not
interested enough to do anything, probably because he saw it as an
expensive and troublesome approach that might even undermine
traditional ways of teaching Japanese on the Berkeley campus. I
feel quite sure that this is the best way for a highly-motivated
student to learn more Japanese in less time, but it is a way that
will not be developed soon, and probably never at such educational
institutions as IUC or the University of California in Berkeley.

Lage: Why do you say that?

Brown: Because, just as in the case of establishing a department or school
for applied linguistics, entrenched interests will be opposed.
Moreover, computer companies are not likely to develop such
complicated and expensive programs for such a limited market.
Computer programs for the advanced study of Japanese will
eventually be developed, I feel quite sure, but only if and when a
Japanese teacher of his own language obtains foundation support

264

that will enable him to obtain needed help for creating such a
complicated but promising program.

The California Abroad Program in Japan, 1991-1993; Recommending
Program Improvements

Lage: I think we should go back to the other program in Japan with which
you were involved: the California Abroad Program. How did you get
into that?

Brown: I got into it three different times as director: first, between
1967 and 1969 when I headed the program at ICU. I have already
talked about that. But I was with the program twice after
retirement: first in the autumn of 1991 when I became director of
the program for Southern Japan and was based in Kyoto, and second,
in the academic year 1992-93 when I was appointed director of the
entire Japanese program that included instruction on at least eight
Japanese university campuses. During the first half of second term
I administered the program from the California Abroad office at
ICU, but in the last half of that year this was done from my home
in Walnut Creek, making rather extensive use of a fax machine, my
computer, and the telephone.

Lage: Was that still an important and strong program?

Brown: I would say that it is still very important, but not strong enough.

Lage: Why was it important?

Brown: It was and is very important because it adds a dimension to

undergraduate education at the University of California that gives
our leaders of tomorrow a sense of reality about life in other
parts of today's world, and at a time when our own safety and
prosperity are becoming more and more deeply enmeshed in relations
with other peoples. It is old hat to say that wars will end and
peace be established only when the people of different nations
begin to understand and to communicate thoughtfully with neighbors
outside their national borders. But the importance of such
understanding and communication is also a prerequisite for mutual
economic growth and technological advance.

In my years with the California Abroad Program in Japan, time
and again I have been impressed with how that year's educational
experience has whetted student interest in the fears, hopes, and
aspirations of the Japanese people. One student after another,
including me, has shifted to some sort of specialization in

265

Japanese studies after a year or so of residence and study in
Japan. So I consider the program not only important, but a
national necessity.

Lage: And why is not strong enough?

Brown: I feel that the programs of study has not been sufficiently

tailored to the intellectual needs and interests of our students.
Essentially, a student in the program is required to add enough
units of credit to allow him or her to graduate from his or her
campus on schedule, within four years. That means that a student
will take a sufficient number of courses at a particular Japanese
campus that have been designed for, and taught to, Japanese
students—not for English-speaking students from across the Pacific
Ocean. It is of course good for our students to take Japanese
courses taught by Japanese teachers for Japanese students, rather
than taking UC courses taught by UC professor abroad as is done in
the Stanford program. An increasingly large number of UC students
go prepared to enroll in courses taught in Japanese. But I have
come to feel that it is usually very uninteresting, even dull and
deadening, for a student to slave away at Japanese courses that do
not stimulate him or her to make an in-depth study of a particular
aspect of Japanese life.

Lage: What can be done about that?

Brown: During my last two terms as director, especially when I was

stationed at Doshisha University in Southern Japan, I gradually
became convinced that each student's study should be focused on the
investigation of one or more problems that have been selected by
the student himself, preferably in consultation with an advisor on
his home campus. In that case the student will logically obtain
seminar-type instruction for his papers, and only take lecture
courses that have some relevance to the subject being investigated.
Experience with two different students—one was a woman majoring in
political science from the UCLA campus, and the other was a man
majoring in economics from Berkeley—has made me quite certain that
this is the way for a student to obtain maximum educational benefit
from a year of undergraduate study at a Japanese university.

The woman from UCLA was determined, even before she arrived in
Kyoto, to make a study of the political and economic problems
attending the building of Kyoto's subway system. She interviewed
both political and business leaders in trying to find out just what
was done by whom to get that subway system built. I talked to
several of the Japanese leaders who had been interviewed by her,
and they were deeply impressed by her ability to raise and
understand complicated questions (in Japanese) in the politics and
economics, of subway coustruction in Kyoto. Then she wrote a long

266

paper (in Japanese) that not only earned her a grade of A but must
have aroused in her a thirst for knowledge that has not been
quenched .

The case of the man from Berkeley made an even deeper
impression on me. He had received A grades both in his study of
Japanese and in his economic courses. But when I first had a long
talk with him- -two or three months after his arrival- -he had become
bored, discouraged, and ready to give up the program and return
home. He made such comments as these: "I can learn more about the
subject of that Japanese course by taking a course in that subject
at Berkeley." "The lectures and readings are very hard to
understand, but when I work hard to figure out what has been said
or written, I find that I have not learned much that is interesting
or relevant . "

I finally asked if there was not something about Japan's
economy that had aroused his curiosity. "Of course," he said, "I
have a number of questions, but the courses I am taking teach me
nothing in those areas." So I asked him to pick out a question
that, to him, was both important and interesting. He quickly
outlined one, which I have now forgotten. But I remember asking
why he did not go to an economics professor in that general area
and ask if he could enter his seminar and work on that question.
His answer was, "Oh, he wouldn't let me do that. He has his own
ideas about what questions are important and should be studied."
But I said, "Why don't you try him?" And I suggested that he do a
little preparatory study, indicate what he had read on the subject
(in Japanese), and explain what he would like to do and why.

That was such a rash and bold step that he hesitated to move.
But finally he did, and came back with the report that this
professor was actually quite enthusiastic about his problem, as
well as about the hypotheses he had proposed. So he was enrolled
in the seminar and began working on a subject that took most of his
time, leaving very little for other courses he was taking. In the
spring term he signed up for additional seminar work, and fewer
lecture courses in unrelated fields.

Then he began to develop real enthusiasm for his

investigation. After that I seldom saw him. But at the end of the
term he submitted a 53-page report in Japanese that impressed us
all. And when I left Kyoto at the end of the academic year he was
still there, doing more study on that same topic. I do not know
what happened to him after that. I wish I knew. But I would wager
that he returned to Berkeley for graduate work on Japanese
economics, received his Ph.D. degree in that field, and has become
an increasingly distinguished scholar at some institution of higher
learning in the United States.

267

Lage: Did you do anything to institute such an approach in the California
Program?

Brown: Yes, I wrote an annual report in which I made two recommendations
for program improvement: One, that each student be required to
write a study-abroad paper to be submitted at the end of the year;
and two, that administrative costs be lowered by requiring students
to do more of their own paperwork when registering for courses in
Japan and when trying to obtain equivalent credit on their home
campuses. I still have a copy of that annual report.

Lage: What was the reaction to it?

Brown: My successor in Tokyo, a woman professor from the Irvine campus of
the University, said that she favored the paper approach and would
try to implement it. But only silence has come from the Santa
Barbara office about my suggestions for saving money.

I doubt if the required-research-paper approach will be
implemented, mainly because it will require more work by both the
director and the individual student. And I doubt if the
suggestions for cutting back on paperwork will ever be adopted, for
that might endanger the jobs of several people in the Santa Barbara
office. It was surely read there with some horror, accounting for
virtually no contact with that office after my term ended. If you
read my report, you will probably see why I made those
recommendations and why they were not adopted.

268

VIII BROWN'S RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS IN JAPANESE HISTORY

Research as a Graduate Student

Lage: Don't you think we should now turn to your research endeavors down
through the years? Did any of your experiences in Japan move you
to undertake research on particular subjects?

Brown: They certainly did. It was the questions, surprises, and shocks

experienced during those first six years in Japan that first moved
me to learn the language well enough to use it for reading what the
Japanese themselves were thinking and writing. These experiences
also motivated me to start translating source materials on the
feudal lord Maeda Toshiie (1538-1599), whose castle was located in
Kanazawa--! passed it every day on my way to and from the Fourth
Higher School. Finally these experiences and the curiosity aroused
by them led me to decide to return to Stanford for graduate
training in Japanese history, rather than to enter law school as
originally planned.

Over and over I have said that it was not the undergraduate
class in Japanese history that created in me a desire to become a
professional historian, but my curiosity about various aspects of
Japanese life that were aroused during those six years of life in
Ranazawa.

That desire, however, was almost destroyed during my graduate
training at Stanford between 1938 and 1941. I am convinced that it
was weakened, most of all, by the drudgery of working for good
grades in courses only tangentially related to research and
teaching in the field of Japanese history, and also by studying
under professors whose lectures and examinations emphasized, with
notable exceptions, coverage and memorization, not historical
analysis. Even Professor Yamato Ichihashi, a Japanese scholar
teaching courses in Japanese history at Stanford, dampened my
enthusiasm for research on Japan because he, having been trained as

269

an economist at Harvard, seemed to have no interest at all in my
attempts to use Japanese sources for the study of questions about
historical developments in the province of Kaga, where I had lived.
He gave me an "A" in his seminar, but had nothing to say about the
problem I had taken up or about the sources I had used, merely
suggesting some changes in the wording and punctuation of a few
sentences.

I concluded that I had made a mistake in not going to Harvard,
where there was no specialist on Japan and where I would probably
have had to work in East Asian languages rather than in history,
but I stuck it out and obtained encouragement and stimulation from
Professor Lynn White, a specialist in medieval European history.
Preparations for a three-hour oral examination in six fields of
history by six professors made me quite ill: there was just too
much history and too many books to cover in such a short period of
time. I passed the oral, but I know that I did not do well in such
fields as Latin American and English history.

I was thinking of dropping out of the Ph.D. program at
Stanford when officers of the marine corps, the army, and the navy
approached me about applying for a commission as a Japanese-
language officer. I think I went into some detail about that
earlier.

During the war, and while I was a Japanese language officer in
the U.S. Navy, my interest in historical research was gradually
restored, probably because I had finished all the courses and
examinations required for the Ph.D. --what was left was only
research on the dissertation, which I knew I would enjoy.
Moreover, the work I did in the navy, "breaking" or recovering
Japanese codes, had a research character. Anyway, as soon as the
war was over, I received a fellowship that enabled me to go to
Harvard for research on my dissertation. And in the autumn of 1946
I was appointed assistant professor of history at Berkeley at a
salary that was less than half of what I would have received if I
had accepted the offer to stay on in the navy. Once more, I had
the urge to make a career of probing for the answers to puzzling
questions about cultural evolution in Japan.

While at Stanford and under the influence of Lynn White, my
research interests changed from Kaga history (about which I did
nothing after the seminar paper that I wrote for Professor
Ichihashi) to the consequences of Japan's adoption of two important
modern techniques: that of defeating an enemy by a massive use of
firearms, instead of relying on such traditional weapons as
daggers, swords, spears, and bows and arrows; and that of minting
and using large amounts of gold, silver, and copper coins for use
as media of er.change in i rupidly expanding economy, instead of

270

relying solely on barter and the use of rice as the principle
medium of exchange. My study of how the introduction and
widespread use of guns had increased the power and control of lords
was written up as an M.A. thesis and later published as an article
in the Pacific Historical Review.' And my work on the development
of money economy in sixteenth- century Japan and its link to an
incipient commercial revolution was written up as my Ph.D.
dissertation and later published by Yale University.2

Japanese Nationalism and Studies of Shinto Thought

Lage: Your experience in Japan must have had a lot to do with your book
on Japanese nationalism.

Brown: Yes, those six years in Kanazawa before the outbreak of World War

II exposed me to puzzling manifestations of one of the world's most
amazing outbursts of nationalism. And while I was a U.S. naval
intelligence officer in Pearl Harbor during the war, I heard and
read of nationalistic behavior by Japanese soldiers that was even
more startling and puzzling. For example, a friend, who was a
marine officer on duty in the South Pacific, told me that when he
was walking along a country road in Guadalcanal a haggard and
starving Japanese soldier suddenly dashed from his place of hiding
to attack my friend, swinging his sword and yelling "Long live the
emperor!" That desperate man apparently knew full well that he
faced immediate death from my friend's loaded revolver but was
nevertheless determined to give his life in one mad act of service
to the Japanese emperor.

That and other tales I heard and read in those years left me
with a strong urge to find out what nationalism was, how it had
evolved in Japan, and why it came to exert such power over the
actions of so many individuals and groups. So as soon as my Ph.D.
dissertation was completed, I began digging into questions in the
area of nationalism. And this work led to the my second book,
Nationalism in Japan: An Introductory Historical Analysis.3

'"The Impact of Firearms on Japanese Warfare, 1543-98," The Pacific
Historical Review (May, 1948) pp. 236-253.

2Money Economy in Medieval Japan: A Study in the Use of Coins (New
Haven: Institute for Far Eastern Languages, Yale University, 1951).

3Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. Reprinted by Russel
and Russel, 1971.

271

Lage: And that led you into studies in Japanese religion?

Brown: Yes. My research for the book on nationalism made me quite curious
about powerful religious roots to that ideological phenomenon.
Clearly Japan's "ultranationalism" flowed directly from and around
an old and officially endorsed belief that each successive emperor
of Japan was a divine descendant of the Great Goddess Amaterasu and
that each Japanese individual belonged to a well-ordered and sacred
"state polity" or "state-body" (kokutai) headed by the divine
emperor.

The Great Goddess Amaterasu was a Kami, and Kami worship is
known as the Shinto religion. So I was impelled to dig into the
nature and evolution of Shinto, especially that part of it that is
called State Shinto, focused on the worship of the Great Goddess as
the founder of Japan's "unbroken" and divine line of emperors. But
State Shinto had emerged and taken its basic character from ancient
and popular forms of Kami worship, indicating that I needed to know
something about Shinto as a whole and about the way Shinto was
connected with other religious and cultural movements in Japanese
history.

Lage: How did you get started?

Brown: By first agreeing to translate, along with Professor James Araki of
the University of Hawaii, key articles and chapters written by
Japan's most distinguished scholar of Shinto thought: Muraoka
Tsunetsugu (1884-1946). I took on this difficult and tedious task
not simply because of my desire to find out exactly what this
famous scholar had written concerning the nature and evolution of
Shinto but also because I was asked by a committee of scholars to
assume responsibility for doing a Muraoka volume in the UNESCO
series, published by the Japanese Department of Education.4

Vitalism, Priestism, and Particularism

Lage: Did Muraoka "s studies have any influence on your later study of
Shinto?

Brown: I was especially interested in his conclusion that three persistent
characteristics of Shinto worship and belief had deeply colored the

'Tsunetsugu Muraoka, Studies in Shinto Thought. Translated by Delmer
M. Brown and James T. Araki, Classics of Modern Japarese Thought and
Culture, vol. 6 (Tokyo: Japanese National Commission foi UNESCO, 1964).

272

whole of Japanese cultural history. These were kskoku shugi
("imperial-country-ism"), Ulitsu shugi ("physical-reality-ism"),
and meijS shugi ("bright-and-pure-ism") . I still write and teach
that Shinto worship has three basic characteristics, but my study
has led me to think of them differently: as vitalism, priestism,
and particularism. Each has been studied and made the subject of
lectures and publications, but not in that order.

Particularism came first. That was the subject of the paper
read at the First International Conference on Shinto Studies in
Claremont, California, in 1965. A dozen or more eminent Shinto
priests and scholars were present. They obviously were interested
in my thesis and were complimentary; and the paper was published in
the Proceedings (page 9-16). A few months later a follow-up
conference was held in Tokyo at which several Japanese scholars
delivered papers on particularism. No one could deny that Kami-
worship at shrines all over Japan had been limited, consistently
and throughout history, to the people residing in a particular
geographical area, that one particular Kami was believed to
dispense his or her blessings on those particular people in
particular ways, and that each shrine had been traditionally
associated with a particular priestly power who stood above and
controlled the people of his or her particular area.

But not one—unless it was my friend Professor Ichiro Ishida--
came right out and accepted my theory. That would have been like a
Christian pastor or scholar admitting that some Buddhist writer was
correct in the way he characterized Christian worship. But I feel
that the theory has helped me and my students to understand Kami-
worship anywhere in Japan, and all through history. It is
especially helpful if we see particularism as standing on one side
of a polar tension between particularistic and universalistic
beliefs and practices, with no belief or practice ever being
absolutely at one pole or the other. Although Kami -worship
(Shinto) has been predominantly particularistic, the Shinto-
oriented new religions of Japan lean toward universalism: they
claim that their Kami can and does dispense its blessings to anyone
in any part of the world. Moreover, even some ancient Shinto
shrines (such as the Tsubaki Grand Shrine near Nagoya) have broken
away from the established tradition that their Kami exerts its
power only in one particular geographical area. We must admit that
some Christian denominations (some more than others) are
particularistic. But I still feel quite certain that the
characteristic which most clearly sets Shinto apart from other
religions of the world is its particularism, as opposed to the
universalism seen in such world religions as Christianity,
Buddhism, and Islam.

273

The second characteristic that I worked on was vitalism. I
read a paper on that subject at the Second International Conference
of Shinto Studies held in Tokyo during the year 1967, a conference
that was probably attended by a hundred or more Shinto priests and
scholars. Even Prince Mikasa, brother of Emperor Hiroto, was
there. As far as I know, my paper was not made the subject of
another Japanese meeting, although it was published in the
conference Proceedings.3 I got the impression that most everyone
accepted the general proposition that any Kami worshipped anywhere
in Japan, at any time and place, is believed to have the spiritual
power to create, enrich, protect, prolong, or renew any form of
life right now. The case for life-affirmation (vitalism) in Shinto
seems to be underscored by the widespread assumption, throughout
the history of Shinto, that any Kami abhors anything associated
with death. Indeed the worst pollution (tsumi) is any thing- -such
as corpses, blood, and illness—associated with death or the
approach of death. Consequently, I have never seen a graveyard
within the compound of a shrine and, as everyone knows, a funeral
or memorial service is customarily held at a Buddhist temple, not a
Shinto shrine. Belief in the life-giving or creative power of a
deity is prominent in most religions, but it is especially
prominent in Shinto. So most everyone seems to accept this
characterization, although usually preferring some other tag or
description.

The third characteristic, priestism, was worked out last. I
have discussed this at length with students in one seminar after
another. But I have not yet written up my conclusions, except for
a brief outline in the introduction of Volume 1 of The Cambridge
History of Japan.6 In developing this paradigm I have been talking
and thinking about the importance of the ancient and persistent
belief that any Kami is more apt to bestow its blessings if
approached by a man or woman (priest or priestess) who is believed
to stand closer to the Kami than anyone else in the community.
Although most organized religions in the world have priests or
priestesses, in Japan their positions seem especially important,
not only when rituals are held at the sanctuary but in all life of
the community, especially in its political life.

The great prestige and power of the priest, what I call
priestism, is probably more pronounced in Buddhism, but it fans out
into organizations and activities outside the boundaries of

Continuity and Change: Proceedings of the Second International
Conference of Shinto Studies. 1967 (Tokyo, n.d.), 169-181 (English), 170-
186 (Japanese) .

6The Cambridge History of Japan Volume 1, 13-16.

274

religion, giving most political, economic, and social leaders and
aura of sanctity or charisma. Under the ideological weight of
kokutai thinking, after the turn of the twentieth century the
emperor was thought of as the head of the state-body. All parts of
the state-body, such as the family, were thought of as integral
parts of a unified Japan that is divinely created and ruled; the
head of every unit in society was depicted as having a divine
(Kami-connected or priestly) role within Japan's state-body. And
although religious freedom is guaranteed by the new post-war
constitution, and the ideology of State Shinto is no longer
propagated in schools or in the mass media, one still sees the
marks of the traditional (divine) role of charismatic leaders
(priests) in surprising places and times. One readily detects
these marks even in Japanese Christian churches, international
business organizations, and radical student movements. I have
dared to call priestism a powerful and enduring field of cultural
energy that helps us to see and assess the importance of
charismatic leadership in all areas of Japanese life.

You can readily see the influence of Muraoka in each of these
three studies. I do not include his first characteristic
("imperial-country-ism") because that is, I feel, a characteristic
of only one important part of Shinto, State Shinto. It is not a
characteristic of popular Shinto, which is still strong and
widespread and out of which State Shinto evolved. But imperial-
country-ism thought was rampant before and during World War II; and
it is intertwined with and reinforced by priestism, since that
priestism is centered on the emperor who has always been thought of
as a divine ruler descended in a single unbroken line from the
Great Goddess Amaterasu.

Likewise, I have not used Muraoka 's term "physical-reality-
ism," but physical-reality gets close to the particular. And his
idea of "bright-and-pure-ism" can be thought of as an aspect of
vitalism, coming very close to "optimism," which is the third
characteristic of early Japanese historical thought that I identify
in my chapter on "The Early Evolution of Historical
Consciousness . "7

Association with Ishida IchirS, and the Gukansho
Lage: What was your next major study in Japanese religion?

7The Cambridge History of Japan. Volume 1, 504-48.

275

Brown: That was a translation and study of a famous interpretative history
of Japan written in 1219 by Jien (1155-1225), a Buddhist priest who
had served four terms as abbot of Japan's strongest Buddhist order
and who was a brother of Kuj5 Kanezane (1149-1207), a regent or
chancellor between 1186 and 1196.

Lage: How did you get into that?

Brown: That was because of comments and suggestions made by Professor

Ishida Ichiro, holder of the chair on Japanese cultural history at
Tohoku University in Sendai, with whom I have worked and studied
for the last forty years.

I think I should say something more about him and our
association before I get into the part he played in our joint
translation of that famous historical interpretation written over
775 years ago.

Developing a Relationship with Ishida Ichiro

Lage: I want you to talk about him.

Brown: One of the proposals made in the last months of my year with the
Asia Foundation in Tokyo was that three Japanese professors
specializing in Japanese history, politics, and education be
invited to UC Berkeley for a year as visiting researchers.

In pressing for approval of this idea, it was pointed out that
although professors in these fields were very influential in Japan,
largely because of books and articles they had written, they
usually did not need English for their teaching and research and
therefore usually had no opportunities for study and travel abroad.
But at Berkeley we had so many professors and students who knew
Japanese that this would be a place where professors specializing
in Japanese cultural subjects could function effectively, even if
they did not know English, and in the process they would be
broadening their intellectual horizons. Their own research and
teaching would be enriched by the addition of a comparative
outlook.

The idea was approved by the Asia Foundation and we set out to
find a historian who would work with me, a political scientist to
work with Professor Robert Scalapino, and a specialist in education
to work with Professor Donald Shively. All three men selected were
already prominent in their particular fields, but became far more
distinguished after their year at Berkeley in 1956-1957.

276

In trying to figure which historian to invite, I sought
suggestions from Charles Sheldon who was then in Kyoto working on
his Ph.D. dissertation. Charles recommended Ishida, then a
professor of Japanese cultural history at Doshisha University in
Kyoto. We extended an offer to him and he accepted it.

Lage: Was he in history then?

Brown: Oh, yes, he had written several books in Japanese cultural history,
and he was holding the chair in Japanese cultural history at Tohoku
University in Sendai.

Lage : Did you know him well in Japan?

Brown: I didn't meet him while I was in the Asia Foundation, I just heard
about him. I first heard about him through Charles, who later
became--oh my, I don't know which strand to start following. When
Charles was a graduate student of mine he had gone to Japan for a
year of research on some grant. It was through him that I heard
about Ishida. Ishida was a very broad, interpretive cultural
historian who had interesting ideas, and was very productive.

Lage: Did Ishida teach here, then?

Brown: Yes and no. He was a visiting researcher and therefore did not

offer courses, but he attended all classes of my lecture course in
Japanese history, as well as my seminar for graduate students
working toward the Ph.D.

In lecture classes the students or I would frequently put
questions to him on the subject of the lecture. Because he was
unable to discuss historical issues in English, all questions
asked, as well as all replies and comments, had to go through me as
interpreter. I think the students enjoyed hearing what a Japanese
historian had to say about developments and issues in the history
of his own country.

But the graduate seminar situation was quite different; every
member of that seminar had been in either the army or navy during
World War II and knew enough Japanese to discuss questions about
Japanese history in Japanese. Consequently every seminar session,
held in my house on Euclid Avenue, was conducted in Japanese.

As I recall, the class included four students who later became
professors of Japanese history: Richard Miller (UC Davis), George
Moore (San Jose State University), Charles Sheldon (Cambridge
University), and Benjamin Hazard (San Jose State University).

277

Ishida himself was also working on an article on the subject of Zen
and Muromachi culture that was later translated into English.

So Ishida, as well as the rest of us, were making research
reports during the course of the seminar. It was probably the best
seminar I have ever had, for the research of each student was made
more interesting and challenging by Ishida' s participation.

My guess is that all of us, including Professor Ishida, will
say that this was one of the most interesting seminars we have ever
attended.

Lage: Did they handle the Japanese language better than later students?
Brown: Yes. Much better.

It was not long after Ishida 's year in Berkeley that I was
asked to assume responsibility for having important studies by
Muraoka translated into English and published as a volume in the
UNESCO series, noted above. By that time Ishida had been invited
to the Tohoku University as Muraoka 's replacement. It was
therefore assumed by everyone that Ishida had urged that I be
selected for translating the Muraoka volume, although I do not
think that Ishida has ever said that he made such a recommendation.

Translating Jien's Gukansho into English with Ishida: The Past
and The Future. 1979

Brown: When I was in Japan on a Fulbright research grant during the

academic year 1959-60, I spent some time with Professor Ishida in
Sendai, probably consulting him about difficult terms and concepts
appearing in Muraoka 's writings. One night we went together to
hear a lecture by the distinguished Christian theologian, Dr. Paul
Tillich. In the course of that lecture, which was given in English
but converted into Japanese by a fairly competent interpreter,
Tillich made the startling statement that an interpretative history
which saw events moving toward a better future could be written
only within the Christian tradition. He was implying that no such
history had ever been, or would ever be, written in a country such
as Japan that had a culture shaped and colored mainly by Buddhist,
Confucian, and Shinto beliefs and practices.

278

Although Ishida made no comments during the discussion that
followed, he was obviously upset by that statement and pointed out
to me, on the way home, that two great interpretative histories
were written in Japan long before anybody knew anything about
Christianity: the Gukansho (Foolish Views) written by Jien (1155-
1225) early in the thirteenth century, and the Jinng no Sh5to-ki
(Authentic Account of Divine Emperors) written by Kitabatake
Chikafusa (1293-1354) in the following fourteenth century. After
much discussion and thought we decided to work together in
translating the Gukansho into English.

Several interrelated considerations led me accept his
proposal. First of all, that interpretative history was written by
a distinguished Buddhist priest whose thinking was obviously
affected by assumptions about the creative power of certain
ancestral Kami, particularly the Great Goddess Amaterasu; and I was
still searching for the nature and effect of religion on Japanese
nationalism. Secondly, I was convinced—after talking at length
with Professor Ishida--that by digging carefully into what Jien had
written I would be obtaining a much clearer sense of what this high
Buddhist priest was thinking and writing on such matters as the
religious dimension of cultural change in Japan. But the third and
probably most important point was that Professor Ishida had
convinced me this was an important classic that needed to be
translated into English, and to be understood.

During the decade or so that followed I translated the entire
medieval text three times, put Ishida 's two articles about the
Gukansho into English, wrote an article about Jien and his ties,
and authored the introduction. Working from the preferred
published edition and utilizing an annotated modern-Japanese
version prepared by Professor Ishida and his students, I set to
work on turning out a draft translation of the interpretative Part
II. (The chronological Part I was taken up later, although we
constantly referred to it as we moved through Part II.)

Since Professor Ishida had studied English for years and had
read numerous English books and articles, he could read my typed
copies of the translations that I kept sending him. Usually his
corrections and comments were written in Japanese but occasionally
English words were inserted. I would then revise those sections
and if alterations were considerable, I sent him a copy of the
revision to check. The process was quite tedious and time-
consuming, and we were often not sure that we had gotten important
paragraphs right. What we needed was a long stretch of time
together to discuss knotty questions at length.

An opportunity to do this for a full semester came in the
spring semester of 1963 when we were both invited Co spend the

279

entire spring semester as senior research scholars at the
University of Hawaii's East-West Center. Both of us rented houses
near the University of Hawaii campus and lived with our families in
Honolulu for nearly six months. We had adjoining offices at the
center and worked full-time on the GukanshS . We would discuss, in
Japanese and for hours at a time, sections for which I had drafted
a translation but about which Ishida had doubts and questions.
These sessions were always followed by a revision, which would then
be read by Ishida and often subjected to more discussion. Our work
together during that semester- -interspersed with some pleasant
times when our two families got together for some trip or party-
resulted in what I call our second version.

But neither of us felt that we had yet gotten to the
interpretative core of the Gukansho . In Hawaii we had been
involved mainly with the meaning of words and sentences, not yet
coming to grips with the question of how Jien's basic assumptions
and beliefs had led him to argue that Japanese history was moving
inevitably toward a resolution of an increasingly bitter conflict
between the military regime in Kamakura and the aristocratic order
in Kyoto. This resolution will come, Jien wrote, only when the
head of his branch (the Kujo) of the Fujiwara clan was placed in
control of both the Kamakura regime and the Kyoto order. And he
thought that such a resolution was inevitable because different
principles (dori) , some Buddhist and some Shinto, had been forcing,
and would continue to force, Japanese political life along an up-
and-down path toward that resolution. He saw upward turns as times
of improvement and downward turns as times of deterioration.

It also gradually became clear to us that, in Jien's
interpretation, times got better under the impact of principles
that had been created by Kami, especially the ancestral Kami of the
imperial clan (Amaterasu no Kami) and the ancestral Kami of the
Fujiwara clan, and that they got worse when Buddhist principles
were strong. Because Jien was quite sure that history was being
propelled toward a better future by the force of Kami-created
principles, we decided that our translation should be entitled The
Future and the Past.

Meanwhile Ishida was writing and publishing a series of
articles on the Gukansho interpretation and I was working up an
article on Jien and his times. Also a new annotated version of the
GukanshS , including numerous scholarly notes, had been published by
Iwanami Shoten. We therefore felt that it necessary to have some
more time together in order to make sure that our translation would
reveal just how Jien's basic ideas and beliefs were used to fashion
his argument that the affairs of this world were moving, whether
anybody like' it or not, toward that glorious time in the near

280

future when the head of Jien's branch of the Fujiwara clan would
stand above both the military and non-military affairs of Japan.

That need was met when Ishida received a grant that allowed
him a full summer of research in California. He and his wife spent
most of the summer with us at our Tahoe cabin where Ishida and I
again plugged away at the translation of the Gukanshe . This time
we gave special attention to the meaning of key concepts and tried
to make sure that the wording of important paragraphs and sections
that showed just how Jien's future-oriented interpretation had been
constructed. Time after time, I discovered that when one of these
concepts became clear, I would have to rewrite an entire paragraph
that we had thought, on the basis of previous work, was pretty
good. As a result of intensive work during that summer—so
intensive that the professor was irritated that we had not spent
more time sightseeing--! redid most of the translation, calling it
our third version which was the basis of what was eventually
published by the University of California Press in 1979.

One review of the book, appearing in a Tokyo newspaper, said
that this was the way translations of ancient historical texts
should be made. My colleague and friend Professor Thomas Smith
also made the comment (passed along on to me by another colleague)
that we had not left any loose ends. I have also heard from
professors at other universities (such as Professor Hilary Conroy
of Pennsylvania University, a former student of mine at Berkeley)
that the book is assigned reading for their courses in Japanese
history. Since Professor Paul Varley of Columbia University has
translated the second great interpretative history (the Jinno
Shot5-ki) , a comparative study can now be made by English-speaking
students who are interested in the history of historical thought
(historiography) .

But as sure as Jien was that history was moving inevitably
toward a time of improvement under a Kujo leader, that is not the
way history turned out.

Lage: [laughs] That was what I was going to ask you: was he right? You
have the advantage of knowing several centuries of subsequent
history.

Brown: In 1221, two years after the Gukansho was written, a war broke out
between the military government in Kamakura and the aristocratic
order in Kyoto. The Kamakura warriors won. Thenceforth
governmental affairs were controlled by military men who held the
title of Shogun, not by aristocratic heads of Jien's branch of the
Fujiwara clan as Jien had argued would happen. Kamakura Shoguns
had become quite powerful even before that civil war, leading
histoi-ians to conclude that Japan's military-oriented feudal age

281

had begun back as early as 1185. But with the Kamakura victory in
1221, military control was firmly established and such aristocratic
clans as the Fujiwara were left on the political sidelines.

Lage: But was it a good study of history?

Brown: It was a bad study in the sense that it failed to show just how
history was destined to unfold, which was the author's objective.
But it has been, and still is, a very important source for later
historical study. It reveals what a Buddhist scholar thought and
believed about the course of Japanese history from very early times
to 1219 A.D. It is particularly valuable for what Jien had to say
about the religious dimension to change, for he was a high-ranking
Buddhist priest and a serious student of Buddhist teachings and
history. Although Jien was an ardent Buddhist, his treatment of
history discloses a deep, seemingly decisive, belief in the power
of Kami-created Shinto principles.

Lage: That was a pretty big task to take on.

Brown: Especially since the Gukansho was written in medieval Japanese that
even Japanese historians say it is hard to understand. A number of
different historians have made the comment, after hearing that
Ishida and I were working on a translation of that classical study
of history, "Oh, I can't understand what Jien was saying about
history."

Lage: But Ishida knew this ancient language?

Brown: He not only knew it but he, as a distinguished scholar of Japanese
cultural and religious history, was able to grasp both the depth
and reach of Jien's thoughts and beliefs about the process of
historical change in Japan before 1219.

Professor Ishida was then writing and publishing articles on
Buddhist conceptions of change, showing us just why Jien's use of
such Buddhist ideas as mappo (final age) had led historians to
characterize the Gukansho as a Buddhist interpretation of history.

Lage: What kind of interpretation would that be?

Brown: An interpretation of continuous deterioration over time, at least

for a long time to come. Belief in such deterioration was based on
ancient Buddhist scriptures written in China and other areas of the
Asian continent, and then long studied by Japanese Buddhist monks
before the turn of the thirteenth century. The idea of four
distinct stages of deterioration after the death of Buddha had
evolved from the doctrine of cosmic decline, through successive
ages called "kalpas." The kalpic do :trine is outlined in an Ishida

282

chapter of The Past and the Future. There he tells us that long
kalpas of improvement have been, and will continue to be, followed
by long kalpas of deterioration. But the important point for those
of us at this particular point in time is that we are passing
through a long period of deterioration identified as the "final age
of Buddhist deterioration" (mappS) that began in 1053 A.D., fifteen
hundred years after the death of the historical Buddha. Marks of
such Buddhist thought are detected in literary works written during
the three centuries or so before Jien began writing the GukanshS .
Consequently the frequent use of mapp5- related words in his account
supports the view that his interpretation is shaped by Buddhist
assumptions of continuing deterioration.

The influence of Buddhist kalpic thought is indeed strong, but
as we worked our way through this translation project, it became
clear to us that, for Jien, times of improvement in Japanese
history—such as when Jien's ancestors had seized control over
affairs at the imperial court, and again in the future when
conflict with the military regime in Kamakura would be resolved--
were not due to the force of Buddhist principles of deterioration,
but to Shinto principles of creativity. Indeed Jien's pattern of
change in Japanese history seems to have been shaped by a tug of
war between Buddhist principles driving human affairs toward
deterioration and Shinto principles driving them toward
improvement, especially in the near future. So we are inclined to
think that while Jien's interpretation is shaped by interaction
between Buddhist and Shinto beliefs and assumptions, belief in the
creative power of Kami is predominant.

The Process of Translation

Lage: When did you make the decision to translate the Gukansho?

Brown: It was pretty much at the time when Ishida was telling me about
this first interpretive history. When 1 said, "We ought to get
that into English," he said, "Let's do it."

Lage: That was a pretty big task to take on.

Brown: Oh, yes. It was a big task, because it was written in the
thirteenth century.

Lage: But Ishida knew the ancient language? Is it the language itself or
the ancient style of the argument that makes it difficult?

283

Brown: Both. Ishida was a specialist in that field. Ht: knew that

language, and agreed to produce a modern- Japanese version. That
was the first stage in the translation process. He wrote a lot of
footnotes and he had his graduate students help him—they do more
of that in Japan than here.

Lage: Team research.

Brown: Team research. That is when I got into the action. We agreed upon
the text to be used. I worked with that and his modern- Japanese
translation to produce the first draft of an English translation.

Lage: That wasn't your first experience, because you had done that
before.

Brown: He had helped me on the Muraoka volume, yes. But here we were
working with a medieval Japanese text with two levels of
difficulty, the Japanese words and phrases were different, and the
interpretation—with a focus on the operation of divine principles
--was complicated. Ishida himself kept struggling (and writing
articles in Japanese) about Jien's interpretation. There were not
only different principles for periods of deterioration and
improvement, but points where Jien seemed to be uncertain or
inconsistent. So when I would submit a draft of a particular
section, he would often revise his modern- Japanese version, having
clearly changed his own ideas about what a particular passage
really meant.

In 1963 we were invited to the East-West Center of the
University of Hawaii as senior research scholars. This gave us the
opportunity to spend six months together on the GukanshS . During
those six months we had no teaching responsibilities, were assigned
to next-door offices at the center, and had research assistance.
Our families were with us and we each rented a comfortable house in
Honolulu. We spent the whole of every day at the center. First he
would go over my draft of a section, noting places where he thought
changes should be made or considered. Then we would meet and talk
about his questions and suggestions. In his presence I would
sometimes try to work out phrasing that he could approve, but often
it meant going back to my desk for more work on another draft,
which he would again study and we would again discuss, sometimes
for an hour or two at a time. But always in Japanese.

Lage: His English was good enough to get a sense of—

Brown: He could read, he could see what I was saying. Often, much of the
conversation would have to be in the nature of explaining in
Japanese what I really had said in English.

284

Lage:
Brown:

Lage:

Brown;
Lage:

Painstaking process.

It took hours and hours, draft after draft.

I don't know how many drafts we made, but after going through
it like this, the next stage was coming to an agreement about what
key terms really meant. Such as the word dori. for principle. We
translated it finally as principle. It was a complicated word, and
I think Jien's concept of it changed as he was writing. There were
Buddhist principles and Shinto principles, and they were related to
each other. But d5ri stood at the basis of his interpretation, so
we really had to understand it.

There were many other specialized terms such as mappo and
others connected with it. There was also Buddhist conception of
up-and-down change as moving through very long, rather long, and
short kalpas. The whole of history is divided up into these
kalpas , and it has been figured out that we are now living in the
deteriorating half of the twentieth small kalpa of a middle kalpa
of existence and deterioration. The Buddhists in Japan also became
convinced that in the year 1052 the world entered the third
Buddhist age (the age of final law), and that this final age will
last for another ten thousand years or so. So the current small
kalpa is not so small.

A very complicated historical concept.

That conception of the process of history was basic to Jien's
interpretation. But as we discovered, it was not as basic as we
had originally thought, because he himself thought things would get
better, very briefly, if the head of his clan should take over.
Principles that made him think things would get better were Shinto,
not Buddhist, although he was a high-ranking Buddhist priest.

After getting a better sense of how those terms were basic to
Jien's interpretation, I felt I had to rewrite many sections. I
had been looking at it from the point of view of words and
sentences and paragraphs, but now I was looking at it from the
point of view of the overall pattern of analysis. Much of it, I
felt, had to be rewritten because in earlier drafts not enough
attention had been given to basic concepts.

It took more than ten years, because you published it in '79,
were in Hawaii in '63. I wonder when you heard Paul Tillich.
might have been when you were a Fulbright scholar, 1959-60.

That's right.

So it's more like twenty y^an.

you
It

285

Brown: Around twenty years, okay. I am glad to get that correct. Well,
it was a long thing. I said, and I think it is right, that I
probably rewrote everything at least three times, with Ishida going
over everything.

Lage: Did you stay friends through all of this?

Brown: Yes, we still are. [laughter] It was great, in a way. I think it
is the way to do translations of that type. I was invited to stay
in the Ishida home in May of 1996, and I spent many hours talking
with him about articles he has recently written, and about problems
that he and other cultural historians are discussing.

One subject on which we spent several hours was his idea that
historical change, especially in medieval times, had a replacement
character: that a way of thinking about change was replaced by a
new and different mode. I do not see change as coming in that way
but as shifts and turns in an endless process of evolution.
Consequently, when he talks about the emergence of a new way of
looking at change, I am inclined to think that he is overlooking
the likelihood that the new way is rooted in, and influenced by
previous ways. I have tried to convince him that historical change
has such a character, but he insists that, at least in the cultural
changes he has been studying, he sees complete breaks. We will
have to go at this again when I see him again next October.

Lage: It sounds like a very dynamic intellectual interchange, and an

extraordinarily long project. Did you publish the modern Japanese
version, too?

Brown: No, we didn't do that. That was done acceptably in the 1968

edition of the GukanshS , the one that is Volume 86 of the Yikon
Koten Bungaku Taikei series.

The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 1

Lage: Now let us look at some of the other things you published.

Brown: My next big job was serving as editor and contributor to Volume 1
of The Cambridge History of Japan.

Lage: How did you get into that?

Brown: In this case, Professor Ishida had nothing to do with it. Instead,
I took on the editorship of Volume 1 because I was asked by
Professor Marius Jansen of Princeton University. I remember his

286

approaching me about this when we were both staying at the
International House in Tokyo, some time in the early eighties,
after my retirement and after I had become director of the Inter-
University Center for Japanese Language Studies. He approached me
in behalf of the four scholars who had agreed to serve as general
editors of the six-volume collection of studies. The four were
Marius himself, Professor John Hall of Yale, Professor Madoka Kanai
of Tokyo University, and Denis Twitchett of Cambridge University.
These general editors had already obtained financing for six
volumes on different aspects of Japanese history from the beginning
to the present, along the lines of the many other Cambridge history
series published since about 1900.

As all professional historians know, these famous histories
began with the Cambridge History of Modern Europe, and now includes
multi-volume collections of historical studies of almost every
major country or region of the world. For the last several years,
one after another of sixteen volumes on the Cambridge History of
China have been appearing, and now we will soon have a six-volume
Cambridge History of Japan. Apparently the idea of producing these
six volumes originated in consultations between Denis Twitchett (a
specialist in Chinese history and an editor of one of the volumes
in The Cambridge History of China) and Marius Jansen and John Hall,
who had obtained their Ph.D.'s from Harvard at about the same time.
Probably Professor Kanai was selected as the fourth general editor
before, and in connection with, an approach to the Japan Foundation
for funding.

Before I was approached by Marius, the general editors had
already decided, probably in consultation with Japan Foundation
officials, that there would be six volumes in The Cambridge History
of Japan, a number undoubtedly dictated by the number of living
specialists in Japanese history within the English-speaking world,
as well as by the amount of money the Japan Foundation was willing
to grant . I do not know the total amount awarded by the Japan
Foundation but, as I recall, the author of each chapter was given
two honoraria of one thousand dollars each: one when he or she
agreed to write the chapter and the other when the manuscript had
been finished and submitted. There was an additional honorarium
for each editor. Probably honoraria and travel funds were set
aside for the general editors, as well as money for the Cambridge
University Press to help with publication.

The general editors had also decided who would edit the last
five volumes on Japan: Professor Donald Shively (Volume 2 on the
Heian Period), Professor Kozo Yamamura of Washington University
(Volume 3 on the medieval period), Professor John Hall (Volume 4 on
the early modern period) , Professor Marius Jansrn (Volume 5 on the

287

Meiji period), and Professor Peter Duus of Stanford University
(Volume 6 on the Modern Period) .

Lage: Why did they ask you to take on the editorship of Volume 1 for the
ancient period?

Brown: I did not ask, but my guess is that they were scraping the bottom
of the barrel. My research and writing had not been in the ancient
period whereas the other five editors had done research in the
periods of their respective volumes. Moreover, I had received my
Ph.D. at Stanford whereas the other five had all received their
Ph.D. degrees at Harvard. I presume that since no Harvard man had
done distinguished work in the ancient period, and others were
thought to be either unavailable or unsuitable, they decided to ask
me and Professor Mitsudada Inoue of Tokyo University to be co-
editors of Volume 1, approaching me first.

Lage: Then how was it that you became the sole editor?

Brown: Because I refused to be a co-editor, even if the other editor was a
scholar as distinguished and respected as Professor Mitsudada
Inoue .

Lage: Why?

Brown: As noted above, I had just finished ten years of work translating
the Gukansho with Professor Ishida. That experience had convinced
me that editing Volume 1 would necessitate tedious and time-
consuming consultations at two levels: first between the author and
the translator, and again between the author and the editor. And
if there was an additional Japanese-speaking editor, there would
likely be an additional level of consultation between him and the
author, the translator, and the other editor. Of course, it is
important for the author to work closely with the translator and
the editor if an English version is to be produced that is both
accurate and readable. But joining Ishida in translating the
Gukansho had resulted in so many hours of face-to-face consultation
that I could not see myself getting involved in a project in which
the difficulties would be multiplied by having a Japanese-speaking
co-editor. I therefore said I would take the job only if I was the
sole editor, as were the editors of all other volumes in the
series.

288

Association with Mitsusada Inoue

Brown: Possibly the general editors thought that two editors for Volume 1
might lighten the editorial load on each of them, and that I might
be more apt to take the assignment if associated with a man said to
be Japan's most distinguished scholar of ancient Japanese history.
If so, I think they were wrong on the first count and only partly
right on the second. Which tempts me say something about my
associations with Professor Inoue, which began in Berkeley around
1950 and ended in Tokyo over thirty years later.

Lage: Please do.

Brown: I had of course done some reading in Inoue ' s writings and knew that
he held the distinguished chair (koza) of Japanese history at Tokyo
University. It was therefore a surprise and a delight to have him
contact me on his way home from a visiting appointment in India in
about 1950, when we were both relatively young. I recall his
attending my class just when I was giving a lecture on developments
in ancient times, the area of Japanese history in which Professor
Inoue had done most of his research and writing. During that hour
I asked for his views about some points that I was making. I can't
remember whether he spoke in English or Japanese, but probably the
latter for in later years our conversations were always in
Japanese. Anyway, the students were obviously pleased to hear
comments from a distinguished Japanese scholar of ancient Japanese
history.

He made a significant statement that I will not forget. It
ran something like this: "As I traveled through Europe and the
United States after a year of teaching and study in India, I moved
through cultures that made me feel I was getting closer and closer
to home." Along that same line, he said that the culture of India
was so different from that of Japan that, during one year there, he
never felt he understood the Indian people.

The second contact with Inoue came in about 1959 when I was in
Tokyo as a Fulbright research scholar. I was one of the four
American scholars invited to deliver an oral report on his
research, at a public hall in downtown Tokyo that could probably
seat more than a thousand people. The affair was sponsored by The
Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading newspaper. Our reports were to be
in Japanese. Two others invited were Professor Edwin Reischauer of
Harvard University (who later became the U.S. ambassador to Japan)
and Professor Donald Shively, who I think was then at UC Berkeley.
The third scholar invited, as I recall, was Professor John Hall who
probably was teaching at the University of Michigan, before moving
to Yale.

289

My participation in the program was unusual on several counts:
first, I was the only person on the platform who had not received
his Ph.D. degree at Harvard; second, I was the only who had not
been born in Japan; and third, I was the only one spoke in Japanese
extemporaneously, not from a prepared manuscript. I am appalled
that I dared to do such a thing before hundreds of people who had
come to hear foreign scholars speak in Japanese about their
research in Japanese history. I too should have read from a
prepared manuscript but did not want to take the time to write it
out and have it gone over by a native speaker of the language, as
the other three had done.

I remember getting a laugh from the audience by explaining
that I had not prepared a written speech because I had been so busy
attending a festival (matsuri) in Sendai. My reference to the
matsuri in Sendai suggests that my research interests were then
shifting, under the influence of Ishida, from a national-socialist
movement headed by Kita Ikki (1883-1937) (a movement on which I did
a lot of work that year but never produced anything that was ever
published) to the religious side of nationalism, ending with the
two books discussed above and my association with Professor Ishida.
When our reports were completed, questions from the floor were
invited. Most of them were directed at me, probably because I
spoke last. I remember that Ed Reischauer was asked a question to
which his reply ran something like this: "I covered that point in
my report." Well, Professor Inoue attended that show and was
backstage to greet us at the end of the performance. I was pleased
to see him and he was most gracious.

I had numerous meetings with him—about twenty years later-
after I had agreed to be editor of Volume 1 of The Cambridge
History of Japan and he had agreed to write a chapter on "The
Century of Reform." I also received much help and advice from him
about which Japanese professors should be asked to write other
chapters. As I recall, four Japanese authors were suggested by
Professor Inoue; and in each case he approached them before I did.
The four were Professor Naoki Koijiro of Soai University whose
chapter was entitled "The Nara State"; Professor Takashi Okazaki of
Kyushu University who wrote on "Japan and the Continent"; Sonoda
Koyu of Kansai University on "Early Buddha Worship"; and Torao
Toshiya of the National Museum of History and Ethnology on "Nara
Economic and Social Institutions".

As Professor Inoue began writing his own chapter, we had
meetings with each other about such general questions as scope and
outline, during which period he invited Dr. Takagi (my associate
director at the Inter-University Center), Mary and me to his
beautiful beach home in Kanakura. It was a delightful occasion,
and Mary and I were both surprised to discover that he had such a

290

spacious and beautiful home in an area where we knew homes and lots
were very expensive. Takagi Sensei later explained that he was
descended from a distinguished Meiji leader and had undoubtedly
inherited a respectable fortune.

Not long afterward he invited me to join him for an interview
and picture-taking associated with the publication of his most
recent book. It turned out that he wanted to have a picture of the
two of us together, either for the book or its publicity. I never
found out whether the picture was ever used, or if so how. Soon
after that he became sick and died, before finishing his chapter
for The Cambridge History of Japan. The difficulties I had in
getting the chapter finished and translated, after his death, have
been briefly reported in the introduction to Volume 1.

Having had such associations with Professor Inoue for twenty
years, Mary and I were invited to his memorial service at a great
Zen temple in downtown Tokyo. Although I had by then gone to
numerous funerals and memorial services in Japan (beginning with a
long Buddhist service in the thirties for several Kanazawa students
who had died in the current epidemic) and have since attended
several others in the United States, I have never seen one attended
by so many people, maybe as many as a thousand. It was probably
the only time Mary or I have been at a Zen memorial service, which
was simple but impressive and centered around--as is true of all
other memorial services in Japan (even Christian ones) --a big
picture of the deceased placed in front of the most sacred place in
the sanctuary and before which every person present pays his or her
respects by putting, slowly and formally, a flower in front of the
picture and bowing twice.

Association with Professor Torao Toshiya

Lage: Do you have anything more to say about your editorship of Volume 1
of The Cambridge History of Japan?

Brown: I could say a lot more about each of the seven authors that I was
in contact with for the ten years or so that it took us to finish
the volume . But I feel I should at least say something about two
of them, because I not only worked with them rather closely for a
long period of time but continued to be in contact with them after
the volume was completed. One was Torao Toshiya (a specialist in
early economic history) and the other was Matsumae Takeshi who is
specialist on Japanese myth.

Lage: What was your association with Professor Torao?

291

Brown: My connections with Professor Torao were quite different, mainly
because he read every sentence of each English translation and
insisted that it say precisely what he had meant to say, nothing
more and nothing less. He did not know English well enough to talk
to me in that language about changes that he wanted to make but
enough to be quite certain if it was not quite right. So I had
many meetings with him after William Wayne Farris made his initial
translation and after Professor Torao had indicated that he was not
satisfied with it. Since I was then in Tokyo where I could be
easily reached, he came to me many times with questions and
suggestions for change. And after those consultations (in
Japanese) I rewrote several sections, and after I had retranslated
a section, there usually would be another consultation, for he
would have questions to raise. In some cases his questions were
based on a misunderstanding of a phrase that I had used, but
frequently it would lead to another revision in which we would get
a bit closer to what he had wanted to say. As a result of working
through section after section of his chapter, we got to know each
other quite well. Several times I visited him and became
acquainted with the new National Museum of History of which he was
then director.

It was because of this relationship that he came to me one day
with a manuscript for a Chronology of Japan that was to be
published by his museum. It had already been translated by a
Japanese member of the staff who was quite good in English, but
Professor Torao wanted me to go over it and make certain that it
was correct and readable. I readily agreed to do that, but did not
realize how much time it would take. Like so many other
translations done by Japanese- speaking translators, many changes
and revisions had to be made. And again after I revised a section,
he would go over it carefully and come back with more questions and
suggestions. I also suggested that changes be made in the original
chronology, which he usually accepted. When that job was finally
done, I received a copy of the Chronology of Japan and was
surprised to find that I was listed, along with Professor Torao, as
a joint editor. I was a bit put out by this. If I had known that
I was to be a co-editor, I would have suggested more changes.
Maybe that is why he did not tell me. But as a result of becoming
a co-editor, I have received a few royalty payments, which have
been appreciated.

Professor Matsumae Takeshi and the Power of Myth
Lage: And how about Professor Matsumae?

292

Brown: I did not have such close and continuous association with Professor
Matsumae as with Torao while editing Volume 1 of The Cambridge
History of Japan, but subsequent contacts with him have been quite
interesting.

Our personal association began when I called on him while I
was in Kyoto as director of the California Abroad Program in
southern Japan to ask for additional information about some of the
books that he had cited in his chapter on "Early Kami Worship." He
invited me to come to his home where we could look up answers in
his personal library. When I got there I was amazed to discover
that he had a copy of every book and magazine about which I was
asking questions. So it took no more than about thirty minutes to
get the information I needed. But we kept talking and talking, for
we were both interested in what the other was doing and thinking
about early Japanese religious history. After three or four hours
had passed, I suggested I leave. But he insisted that I stay on
for dinner. And after dinner we continued to talk, which meant we
were talking for over eight hours, until ten o'clock at night.

Since that contact was so interesting, I called him again when
I went to Kyoto in the spring of 1996. That was a month- long trip
that I took alone. I spent most of two days with him and his wife.
Mrs. Matsumae had been in the U.S. with him during his year at the
University of Indiana in 1975-76, and she had apparently made a
serious study of English and wanted to use it. So I talked with
her a bit, but Professor Matsumae--who had himself been a teacher
of English in his earlier years—would speak to me only in
Japanese.

We spent most of those two days going to old shrines that
dated back to the beginning of the Heian period, over a thousand
years ago. It was not a simple sight-seeing trip but an in-depth
educational experience. At each shrine we met and talked to high
priests, participated in a simple purification rite, and walked
around the grounds as Professor Matsumae explained the historical
and mythical setting of what we saw. It was fascinating, and after
returning to the hotel on each of those two nights, I wrote up (on
my laptop) notes on what I had seen and learned, and on articles
and books that he recommended I read.

A few months later he wrote me about the publication of his
collected works in thirteen volumes , and asked me to write an
article for Volume 13, which was to be made up of his English
writings. Since he has become known in Japan, as well as in the
United States, as one of Japan's leading scholars of Japanese myth,
and I had done considerable reading in his publications for my
course on Shinto at the Starr King School for the Ministry in
Berkeley, I readily agreed. By way of preparation I began reading

293

--again and more carefully — his autobiography completed in 1992.
There I discovered that he had gotten into the study of Japanese
myth because of his experiences during and after World War II. And
as I read and thought about what had happened in those early years ,
I became convinced he was right. Moreover, I felt that his
reaction to Japanese religious nationalism (to what he called
Japan's Imperial-Country thought) was helping me understand both
the destructive and constructive power of myth, not only in Japan
but elsewhere. So I immersed myself in that project and soon found
that I was writing about four times as much as I had agreed to.
But I felt I had to keep writing because I was beginning to find
answers to some important questions.

Finally I sent the manuscript off under the title of "The
Making of a Shinto Scholar." Sure enough, the publisher could not
allocate so much space to something not written by Matsumae
himself. But Professor Matsumae liked what I had written and
recommended that I have the whole published in some English journal
and to produce a boiled down summary for his collected works, which
I am now doing. And the article has become even longer.

Selection of Contributors, and Working with Japanese Scholars

Lage: Let's get back to your editing of Volume 1 of The Cambridge History
of Japan. You said you regretted that Professor Ishida was not
invited to contribute a chapter to any of the volumes.

Brown: Yes, I do regret that. But he is not really a specialist in any

one period of Japanese history but in Japanese cultural history as
a whole.

Lage: You seem to have a lot of regrets about it. Did it lead to
problems with these people?

Brown: No. Well, [Carmen] Blacker got quite angry about the whole series,
as I understand it. Not at me personally. I have never met her.
I think she and others at Cambridge, I have heard, did resent being
excluded from a series put out by their university. It was a
Cambridge University project, and Cambridge University professors,
distinguished ones, were not included. I guess that was the source
of the problem.

Lage: Were many Japanese scholars included?

294

Brown: More in some volumes than others. In the modern volumes, not many,
but some. In my volume, for instance, most of the contributions
are by Japanese scholars, because not too many Americans or
English-speaking people have worked in that early period. In the
Volume 2--incidentally, that volume is not out, even now—part of
the problem is that they had to rely heavily on Japanese authors.
When you have a Japanese author, you face a lot of problems, not
just getting it properly translated. The Japanese are not
accustomed to writing for the Western readers.

Brown: The tendency of the Japanese- -which is a tendency in this country
too, I think, with American historians writing about American
history- -is to write just as they do when writing for the Japanese
reader. So when an English reader reads this, he is apt to ask,
"What's he talking about?"

Lage : Because there is too much shared knowledge?

Brown: That's right. There are a lot of assumptions. When writing for
his own people, he assumes that the reader is going to know this
and that. When the reader is from another culture, there is an
awful lot that is not understood. There are just too many names
and dates and events that don't mean a thing. It is almost
unreadable .

Another problem is a general tendency, among Japanese
historians, to deal with history descriptively. Whereas in the
American history profession, we are much more interested in the
meaning, the process of change, and the connections; in
interpretation and analysis.

Lage: But in the descriptive history aren't there kind of hidden
interpretations, maybe?

Brown: Yes. They may have been so well hidden you can't see them,
[laughter]

Lage: They are not the subject themselves?

Brown: Right. Actually, most of my chapters had to be rewritten.

Lage: And did you have to do that?

Brown: I did most of that. It varied from chapter to chapter. Either I
or the main translator had to do a good deal of redrafting. I did
most of that. But each chapter posed a different set of problems.
The chapter by Professor Inoue, for example, required a lot of work

295

even though he was a very distinguished scholar of ancient Japanese
history, had studied abroad, and written many famous interpretative
studies. The main problem was that he died before finishing his
chapter. I found a very capable young American historian who was
willing to translate what Professor Inoue had written. But he
didn't have the time to do the reading required to write the last
half. My associate director at the Inter-University Center,
Takagi Sense! , who was also a distinguished scholar, agreed to take
on that task. But the two halves seemed to lack unity. And so
after doing considerable reading in various books and articles
written by Professor Inoue, I spent a lot of time trying to make it
into a chapter that would introduce the Western reader to the main
historical contributions made by Professor Inoue during life of
research and teaching in Japanese history. So I had to do a lot of
rewriting.

Lage: But it still goes under the other author's name?

Brown: The chapter is "By Inoue Mitsusada with Delmer M. Brown." Miss

Takagi did a lot of work on it, but since I had redrafted it, she
didn't want to be considered a co-author. She said I ought to be
the co-author. I tried to give her credit for the work that she
did, but I ended up being listed as with Inoue.

Lage: I am wondering what reflections you might have on the benefits of
looking at a culture or the history of a country from outside.

Brown: Now, did we really finish the earlier question? I am afraid that--
do you remember the earlier question that you asked?

Lage: It was mainly about this Cambridge History.

Brown: You started off with a question about translation, and we got into
the Cambridge History and its problems. I haven't dealt with them
all—every chapter was a special case. I was the author of two
chapters under my own name and also wrote the introduction. That
was treated like a separate chapter. I was a co-author of two
others .

Lage: Were these delicate issues, working with the Japanese authors and
not being quite satisfied?

Brown: It was different in every case, but quite rewarding in a way. I

would say the most difficult one, difficult in terms of the amount
of time it took in dealing with the author, was with Professor
Torao in the field of economic history. In that case, I didn't get
in the picture at all. I was not included as an author, co-author,
or anything. The translator, William Wayne Farris, 'lidn't want to
work with Torao on this. Professor Torao knew enoug.i E iglish to

296

read what had been written, and he wanted to have it right. I was
the one to get it right, as it turned out, and we ended up with a
translation quite different from the one done by Farris. His name
is still on the chapter, and I think connections between what we
did and what was finally published are hard to find. [laughter]
We worked hours and hours, because Torao knew enough English to
read what we thought he had written; and if he didn't understand
it, I had to explain it. My talking with him was always in
Japanese. So if he didn't understand it, I had to explain what we
had written, and then he would have to either agree or disagree.
If it wasn't quite what he had said, he would let me know about it.
I really felt like I had to understand every single thing in order
to get it right, just days and days--I don't know how many weeks,
months that we spent on this.

Lage : You must be a patient man.

Brown: But I learned an awful lot about economic history through that

process. I think that is probably one of the better chapters. It
was historically oriented. He had a developmental process that was
quite clear. It was short, but it was the way he wanted it, and I
think it was good.

We really had to satisfy each other before we would agree on
it. Somewhat like the process I went through with Ishida on the
Gukansho . I feel that is the only way you can get a proper
translation done. If an American does it, he may think he
understands the thing perfectly well, but he is primarily concerned
with writing something that is readable and clear in English. The
author knows what he wanted to say, and if that it not what is said
in English, we have to work on it.

Lage: Both people, perhaps, are working through this fog of language
differences.

Brown: That's right. I think more and more people feel that's the way

that translations should be done. The final product, whether it is
in English or Japanese, should be written by a native speaker of
that language, but there ought to be a lot of give and take between
him and the author to be sure that they have it right.

Lage: Then how did you deal with, it seems like almost a separate
question, when you felt the chapter wasn't right for Western
audiences, too detailed or not interpretive enough?

Brown: That creates a problem. Of course, whenever I redrafted a chapter,
I always let the author see it. In general, he would accept it
right away, making me worder if he had really looked at the
suggested revisions carelul]y.

297

Lage: When you sent it back to them, would you explain the reasons?

Brown: Yes, I tried to do that. Well, every chapter was a special
problem.

Lage: This sounds like quite a task.

Brown: That's why I don't want to get into it again. The chapter on

Buddhism, for example, was by Professor Sonoda Koyu. He did an
excellent job on the history of Buddhism as it moved through Korea
on the way to Japan. The whole chapter was supposed to be about
early Buddhism in Japan. He used up all the space he had and more
before he really got to Buddhism in Japan. I had to boil down his
excellent treatment of the spread of Buddhism in Korea in order to
make room for a discussion of the spread of Buddhism to Japan,
which is undoubtedly the most significant aspect of Japanese
cultural history in ancient times, as well as later. I had to
spend considerable time reading books that others had written on
the history of Buddhism during those early centuries.

I learned an awful lot, and I think it is not a bad chapter.
Again, I sent him a copy of what I did. I am not sure that he read
it that carefully.

Lage: Are you a co-author on that?

Brown: Yes. I learned a lot in writing that. I had it read over by Lew
Lancaster, who is a professor of Buddhism at Berkeley. He made a
couple of suggestions that turned out to be worth another footnote
or two that made it better and more valuable. Lew seems to think
well of it. I think the chapter is useful for those looking into
the field of early Buddhism. It is useful for me, anyway.

Lage: If you knew what this assignment was going to entail, would you
have accepted it?

Brown: I think not. I spent far more time--I suppose I could have written
two or three books on my own in the time that I devoted to writing
and rewriting and looking into--

Lage: But still, you almost did write two or three books in doing it.

Brown: For some of the things that I devoted an awful lot of time to, my
name is not indicated in any way as the author, like the Torao
chapter.

Lage: Right. Well, look at all this oral history is revealing.

298
The Insider's Versus the Outsider's View in the Study of History

Lage: Would you have some general comments about studying a culture or
the history of a country from outside the country versus from
within?

Brown: That is a problem faced by every American historian who ventures to
specialize in the history of people outside the United States.
Just as an American historian usually has doubts about the depth
and quality of studies of American history written by non-
Americans, so the Japanese logically have doubts—which are not
usually expressed—about the quality of studies made by non-
Japanese persons, especially if they do not know Japanese and have
not read extensively in the studies written by Japanese historians.
The problem is especially acute in ancient history for there has
been something of a Japanese boom in ancient Japanese history.
Consequently almost any subject has been studied and re- studied,
often for centuries. Not only that, an amazing amount of written
sources are available, often written in a language that is
difficult even for the Japanese specialist to understand. So a
foreign historian dealing with any question in the ancient history
of Japan faces three very difficult problems: the massive amount of
source material; the huge number of studies made by Japanese
scholars down through the centuries; and the difficulty of
understanding the written language of those ancient times.

But as Sir George Sansom and others have noted, it should be
easier for the outsider to look at issues objectively and
comparatively. Of course, an outsider is not necessarily more
objective, for he or she may have a particularly strong bias.
Moreover, an outsider may not know as much about comparable
developments in other cultures as a Japanese historian. But
because we are looking at the Japanese development from another
culture, our perspective is bound to be somewhat different.
Whether that helps us to get closer to truth is questionable. The
main questions are these: do we look closely at all available
evidence, and do we think carefully about connections and
interactive currents? To do this well is difficult for anybody
but, in general, it is more difficult for the outsider.

When I am dealing with Shintoism, I look at it quite
differently from Japanese specialists in Shinto history, who are
usually Shinto priests. They are really looking at their religion
from the inside. I look at it from the outside and am trying to
make comparisons between that religion and my own religion, and
between that religion and other religions that have come into
Japan, such as Buddhism and Confucianism. I feel that that kind of
comparison and that kind of objectivity, usin>>, religious studies

299

and other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, helps me
to analyze and, I hope, get closer to what Shintoism really is. I
ought to be able to do that better than, say, a Shinto priest.

But it should be noted that most Shinto scholars are not
priests but professors at one of the two leading Shinto
universities in Japan: the Kogakkan University located near the Ise
Shrine, and the Kokugakuin University in Tokyo. Both include a
number of distinguished scholars, but there are many more at
Kokugakuin University, which has thousands of students. It has a
distinguished Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics that has
published four English volumes of Shinto studies by professors
associated with Kokugakuin. The work of putting these into English
is done mostly by Norman Havens, who has a tenured position there.
After completing all requirements but his dissertation for a Ph.D.
degree at Princeton in Japanese religion, he spent a year at the
Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies (before I got there)
and then took this position at Kokugakuin. He has never returned
to Princeton to get his Ph.D. degree. So Norman and all professors
at those two Shinto universities make up a great body of Shinto
scholars who are writing very important studies of Shinto.

When I go to Japan nowadays, I always go to see people at that
university. Just a few weeks ago an agreement was signed between
the University of California and the Kokugakuin University that
allows us to work together on common teaching and research
programs. What we are working on now is the joint creation of a
Shinto database that will permit students and scholars all over the
world- -anyone who has a computer- -to gain access to an increasingly
large body of Shinto materials and also to do research in those
materials by computer. We have already agreed to work together in
translating that into English, and then putting that English
translation into the Shinto database. Among these translations is
the best and most recent dictionary of Shinto, which was produced
in Japanese by a number of professors at Kokugakuin University. It
is over 800 pages long. We are applying for a grant that will help
us to pay students to do the work of translating this dictionary
and placing it in the database.

Lage: Do the Japanese Shinto scholars ever reflect on your
interpretations? Do they give you any feedback?

Brown: Not often, and for one reason: everything I write is in English,
and most Japanese historians, especially those specializing in
Shinto, do not read English easily and therefore can not be
expected to take the time to work out what I have written. This is
true even of Professor Ishida and Professor Torao. While both of
them are very careful to work through a translation of what they
have written or wish to put their name to, they are not apt to

300

spend a lot of time going over anything written by a foreigner
about Japanese history. But I get a lot of feedback when I am
talking with them in Japanese. And this is something I always seek
and value when I go to Japan.

But there is an exception. I have just received a lot of
valuable suggestions and ideas from Professor Matsumae Takeshi
about an article that I have just written about his life, an
article that I am entitling "The Making of a Shinto Scholar, that
is to appear during the year 1998.

Lage: Wonderful. I think that is a nice way to end today,
made you talk a long time.

I've really

301

IX TEACHING

[Interview 6: May 1, 1995] ft

Foreign Language Study at Berkeley, and the Committee on Foreign
Language Study

Lage: We were going to start today with some thoughts about foreign

language teaching and studies. I know that is something you have
been concerned with for a long time.

Brown: Yes. I first became concerned about this as a teacher of Japanese
history when I first started teaching here. We had a number of
students who were qualified in the language because they had been
trained either by the army or the navy in intensive language
programs that lasted one year.

But within a few years that supply of trained students
disappeared. Then I began to have students who were seriously
interested in pursuing a career of study in history and Japanese
history, but their language competence was low. They had taken
courses and received good grades at Berkeley; but when they got to
Japan, they really couldn't get around in Japanese and,
furthermore, really couldn't read Japanese historical materials.

So I began to complain a little about our language programs
here with my colleagues working in other language areas, and they
too were dissatisfied with what was happening to their students who
took courses in their languages. We discovered a good deal of
dissatisfaction with language instruction in all fields.

Lage: Not just in Asian languages?

Brown: Not just in the Asian field. Even in the European area, professors
were complaining that their students were taking too long to gain
enough proficiency in German or French to use materials in those

302

languages for historical research. Further discussion with
professors in these and other areas would usually bring us around
to the view that teachers in the foreign language departments were
not really interested in such practical instruction: that they were
more interested in teaching philology, linguistics, or literature.
It was for achievement in those areas that they had been appointed
and promoted, and it was on the basis of such achievement that they
were making new appointments in the various language departments.

Lage: But this was probably true, wasn't it?

Brown: That's right. In almost every department, whether it was Japanese,
Chinese, or whatever, it turned out that most language instruction
was for students who wanted to learn to use it, either in traveling
or in research. This teaching was usually done by native language
speakers who had not usually been trained in teaching the language
to foreigners. There were two types of teachers at this level.
One was native language speakers, and other was graduate students
who had gotten good grades. But in most cases, although they were
competent in the language, they really hadn't had any specialized
training in how to teach it.

Because of this complaint, Chancellor Strong set up a special
committee and made me chairman. On this committee there were
representatives of almost every foreign language department in the
university. It was a big committee. It also included some people
who had students who needed to know the language for research. We
gave a lot of attention to the problem, and we wrote a long report,
the main point of which was that the situation wouldn't be changed
unless a special department or program were set up in which we
would train and use specialists in the teaching of the language for
actual use--not simply as an object for specialized linguistic or
philological analyses.

Lage: Were you suggesting that students who were studying Japanese would
go to this department?

Brown: Yes. We recommended the establishment of a new school or institute
for teaching our students, as quickly as possible, how to speak,
write, comprehend, and read the language as a tool for study and
research in that particular cultural area.

Lage: So it would be the graduate students or instructors who would go to
this school?

Brown: Yes, anybody who wanted to learn any foreign language. That would
include freshmen and other undergraduates as well as graduate
students and instructors. That is where yon or I would go if we
wanted to learn a new foreign language. It would be staffed by

303

people who not only knew that language but who had learned the best
techniques for teaching it. At UCLA and a few other universities
this sort of instruction is being developed for the training of
those who wish to make a career of teaching English to foreign
immigrants to the United States.

Lage: How did the language departments react to this?

Brown: At the committee meeting, they seemed to be in favor of it. In

theory, they could see that language—at elementary and secondary
levels — could be taught better by specialists who really knew how
to do it, rather than just relying on native language speakers who
had no training. That would allow regular members of the
department to teach and do research only in specialized fields of
the language, rather than how to speak and read it. They saw the
merit of that.

As a result, as I recall, the committee recommendation went
through unanimously, with even members of the various language
departments favoring the establishment of a separate discipline, a
separate school, in which appointments and promotions would be in
terms of the proven ability to teach and do research in the field
of practical language learning.

But nothing happened. I am not sure why that is, I am only
guessing now. But I have a feeling that even the persons on the
committee who were in favor of such a change were, in the end,
against it. Why? Because if a change like that were made, the
established language departments would have the foundations of
their financial support weakened.

Lage: It sounds like it.

Brown: Most of the appointments in all departments in the university are
made in terms of the student load within that department. And the
student load in most of these foreign languages departments is
principally the students who are in first-year, second-year, third-
year language courses—not students specializing in the literature
or philology of a particular language. If you had a separate
school in which all of this language teaching was done, the
established departments would lose most of the students they now
teach.

I can see that if all of the Japanese and Chinese language
teaching at the beginning level were handed over to another school,
the East Asian language department would not have that much
justification for new appointments in that department.

Lage: Thay probably svpport some of the graduate students that way also.

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Brown: Exactly. A lot of the graduate students are teaching assistants in
these elementary courses, even though they too have not had any
training in how you teach this language to non-native speakers.

In Japan they have the same problem. This was also true in
the teaching of English in Japan. That is a big, big program every
school--

Lage: One that you took part in.

Brown: I took part in it for six years. I had no training in the teaching
of English to Japanese. That's when I began to have misgivings
about the whole language- teaching enterprise. Even today most
English teaching is done by Japanese teachers who have gained a
reputation in such specialized areas as Shakespeare, Chaucer, or
some other literary figure. Very few have had special training in
how to teach English to the Japanese. Most schools have a foreign
teacher who, like me, has graduated from an American university and
presumably speaks and reads English, but who usually has had no
training whatsoever in how you teach this language to foreigners.

Lage: Two quick follow-ups. You say nothing was done about your report

at Berkeley. What happens to these reports? Did you follow it up?

Brown: Yes.

Lage: Did it come in front of the Academic Senate?

Brown: No. It was a committee set up by the chancellor. And we sent our
report to the chancellor. I heard nothing more about it after
that. He may have raised some questions with some of the
established departments, I don't know.

Lage: Or it could have gotten, with all of the turmoil on campus which

followed that, maybe it just-
Brown: That might be. It was not too long after that that Strong got into

trouble and resigned. That may have had something to do with the

disappearance of the report, I don't know.

The California Abroad Program and Problems of Language Preparation
among Participants

Lage: Okay. Then I wondered if there was more to say for the ten years
you were director of Inter-University Center for Japanese Language

305

Studies,
that?

Did you have a chrnce to put forth some of your ideas in

Brown: First, before I get into the Inter-University Center, I should

point out that I was in Japan between '67 and '69 as director of
the California Abroad Program. We also had the language problem in
that program, too. At first, most of the California students
selected to go to the California Abroad Program in--

Lage: Now, this is the UC program for education abroad?

Brown: University of California program for undergraduates, mostly. A

kind of junior-year-abroad program. That was first established in
Japan around 1960. When I got into it in "67, it was already a
worldwide program with California Abroad Programs in something like
thirty different countries of the world.

Lage: And how many students, approximately, went to Japan?

Brown: In those days, we had between twenty-five and thirty every year.
Now it is much larger, not just at the International Christian
University [ICU] but in at least ten other universities as well.

Lage: Is the ICU where it was centered?

Brown: That's where the California Abroad Program was based, and still is.

At that beginning and because it was an undergraduate program
and not many undergraduates had done any work in Japanese, the
knowledge of Japanese was not required for admission.
Consequently, we had many students who had no knowledge of Japanese
at the time of their admission to the program, and they were not
very well prepared for study in Japan.

Lage: Their classes had to have been taught in English.

Brown: Yes, in those early days they had only courses taught in English.
And the courses taught in English were for the most part taught by
Japanese who had studied in the States or in England, and who knew
English fairly well. But they were not very demanding courses, and
the students didn't find them that interesting, partly because the
teachers were not experienced in teaching courses in English.

I felt that the program was pretty weak and recommended that
no student be admitted to the program unless he or she had
completed at least one year of university-level study of Japanese
and received a grade of B or better. That was eventually done.
Now some California students are even studying at universities
where no English courses are offeced,

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Lage: So some of them had to have quite strong Japanese.

Brown: That's right. At Doshisha University, for example, which is also a
Christian university, no courses are taught in English. There the
students must have completed three years of Japanese language study
before admission. Yet the students there also have trouble. With
three years of Japanese, they really have difficulty getting
anything out of the courses they are taking in Japanese.

Lage: I am assuming they are taking courses alongside Japanese students,
or are they courses designed for foreigners?

Brown: There is only one course for foreign students, and that is not

highly regarded. Each student's situation is different. Usually,
many of the Cal students are Americans of Japanese descent and have
learned some Japanese at home. If they have heard a good deal of
Japanese at home, they do not have much trouble in a Japanese
class. The ones who had the most trouble were Americans who had
had no Japanese at home, just course work in the university. Even
though they may have had three years of Japanese and received a
grade of A, they still found it very difficult to get anything out
of their Japanese courses. In other words, the Japanese that they
were learning in American universities, even in good places like
Berkeley and UCLA, didn't seem to be enough.

We couldn't help but reach the conclusion that the language
instruction was still deficient, that something should be done
about improving the quality of Japanese language teaching. My
feeling, and that of several others—including Eleanor Jordan at
Cornell who is a distinguished American teacher of Japanese — is
convinced that some rather basic changes must be made.

The Use of Computers in Language Education

Brown: I am inclined to think that language teachers have not begun to tap
the potentialities of interactive teaching by computer. I have
heard about such instruction in German and Spanish, and I also know
that good programs have been developed commercially for the study
of elementary Japanese. But virtually nothing had been done along
this line for instruction in Japanese at the advanced level when I
resigned as director of the Inter-University Center about ten years
ago. And when I last talked to people connected with the Center,
it seemed that nothing more had been done since my departure. I do
hear about computers being used in language courses, but this
apparently is only in the classroom. I think that truly
remarkable results will be achieved only when interactive programs

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can be used by the individual at home. Then he or she will be able
to use it whenever he or she wants and as long as is wanted. If
that freedom is also coupled with game-playing, I think that
remarkable results would be achieved in the study of vocabulary,
grammar, and idioms. Such study could be made fun, not just the
usual drudgery. A student would be encouraged to move at his or
her own pace, not simply trying to keep up with, or to pass, one's
classmates.

Lage: It seems normal to have that one-on-one, and then have the
classroom be a group situation.

Brown: Right. Of course, that's expensive. It's expensive to have that
many computers, and also expensive to create the program,
especially at the advanced level. At that level the market is
limited.

Lage: The subtleties of the language, I think, would be hard to
computerize.

Brown: Yes. But I still think that the potential is there. We have the
technology for doing it. It makes sense to use these machines for
self -teaching. Of course, you have to have the opportunity to
practice the language with somebody and actually use it, but the
use of computers for self-training has great potential which has
not been tapped.

Lage: If we had that school of language studies, perhaps it would have
been tapped.

Brown: Right. But I am afraid we are going to be very slow in taking any
positive steps in that direction.

Lage: It is a complicated problem, I would guess.

Brown: Yes. And I faced this problem again when I was made director of

the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in 1978.
That is a program primarily for graduate students who will need to
use Japanese in their career. This is an intensive language
program at the advanced level, after a student has completed two or
three years of Japanese language study, or the equivalent, in an
American university.

Lage: Were they primarily Americans?

Brown: A few English and a few Canadians and a few Australians, but all
from the English-speaking world. The Center realized, from the
beginning, that if you move into Japanese language teaching for
people in other language areas (such as German or French) , the

308

language teachers face a different set of problems. So the program
has been limited to students from the English-speaking world.

Then we began to get teachers who had had some training in how
to teach Japanese to foreigners. They were trained in a fairly
distinguished government-supported institute. That was definitely
a move in the right direction.

Lage: Did you observe a difference?

Brown: Yes. Without a doubt our best young teachers were those who had
come out of that training program. But we had to hire some
teachers who had not received such training. When I left, I would
say a major part of the teachers had not had any special training.
Although these were very conscientious, worked very hard, and
seemed to really be interested in trying to get the students to
speak the Japanese language right, and to read it easily and
quickly, they did not seem to have that much interest in
experimenting with the use of computers. I suppose they felt that
to the extent you move down the computer direction, their own
teaching responsibilities would be limited, maybe undermined. I
don't know. Somehow there was no enthusiasm for it.

Lage: So it's hard to make change in all these different settings.

Brown: Yes. The teachers seemed to be convinced, as most teachers are in
this country, that the way to teach is directly and personally. As
soon as machines get into it, they assume the situation will get
worse.

Lage: Yes. And you don't feel that way?

Brown: I don't feel that way. Of course, the personal touch is important
and valuable. In language teaching there is no substitute for
actually using it in a person-to-person conversation. But in such
difficult areas as building up your vocabulary and improving your
grammar, things of that sort, I am convinced that a computer can
speed up the process considerably.

Lage: I would think so, as long as it is not seen as a substitute for
those things you mentioned.

Brown: Yes. It should supplement it.

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More on Education Abroad. 1991 and 1992- '93

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:
Brown:

Do you have more to say about the California Education Abroad
program? I know you wrote some notes before we started this about
your thoughts on the particular program we have here and how it
might be improved.

As I mentioned earlier, I went back again in 199 I—twice as a
matter of fact—to be director of the Education Abroad Program in
Japan. During my second term in 1992- '93, I was director of the
whole California Abroad Program in Japan, which had programs in
something like fifteen different Japanese universities throughout
Japan.

Fifteen different universities they have students going to?
is amazing.

That

Yes. During that year—I could not be in Japan during the entire
year because I had already committed myself to teaching at the
Pacific School of Religion [PSR] in the spring. But I had the
position of director for the whole year. I was in Tokyo for the
first part of the year and in California for the remaining months .
I did my directing, on this side of the Pacific, by fax machine and
telephone. The university had supplied me with a fax machine which
I used every day. There was a lot of paperwork.

What was your responsibility?

I had to approve the study list of every single student. Even if
he or she had worked with teachers and members of the university
and Center staff, his list had to be signed by me. There were also
personnel problems, such as the appointment and promotion of
members of the Tokyo Center staff. But probably the most difficult
and time-consuming task was assigning grades that would be in
accord with UC standards and would also be acceptable to the
Japanese teachers. It was very difficult to make a Japanese
language teacher understand that I had to give a student an A grade
instead of the B originally assigned. Even though a particular
student may have received a grade of A in every Japanese class
taken at UC and had stood very high in language examinations at
ICU, the teacher was positive that no matter how good and
conscientious the student was, he or she deserved only a B.

Did you relate to the students at all, or was that done—

While I was in Tokyo, yes. As a matter of fact a good proportion
of my day was spent talking to students . And then when I had to
return to Berkeley, but was still director of the program in Tokj'o,

310

there was considerable communication by telephone and fax. That
was not satisfactory. The director should be in Japan.

At the end of my appointment I submitted a report in which I
recommended two changes. First, give the students more
responsibility for working out their programs and filing their
study lists directly to Santa Barbara, and also give staff members
the responsibility of handling a number of clerical matters
traditionally handled by the director. In such ways, a director
could be given more time for teaching—for talking with students
about what they are studying in this foreign land. Each student
has his or her own special problems in learning about some aspect
of Japanese culture, and needs the help of someone who can see the
situation from an American point of view. I felt that it was wrong
to have a full-time senior professor spending most of his or her
time on clerical matters. There are of course high-level
administrative responsibilities that must not be shirked. But the
director is always a professor in the UC system and should function
as a professor. If not, the taxpayers should object.

The second recommendation was that the program be altered to
emphasize individual research in a student's particular field of
interest, not attendance at lecture courses and the assignment of
grades based on examinations. During my three terms as director of
the California Abroad program in Japan, I became convinced that, in
general, students were not learning as much as they should about
Japan during their one-year stays in that country. Although
convinced that they learned much by living in Japan, I became quite
sure that they were not learning nearly enough in courses they were
taking in Japan. This was a particularly serious problem at
Doshisha University, Tohoku University, and other universities
where all courses were taught in Japanese. But even at ICU, where
many courses are offered in English, one American student after
another told me that it was too easy to get by- -and even get a good
grade- -without doing much work; that the Japanese teachers were
friendly and helpful but their lectures were not very stimulating
or interesting; as far as learning about a particular area of
Japanese life an American student would have learned much more from
a course on his own campus; and that no class demanded as much
reading or paper writing as at UC. This is regrettable because the
program offers such an important opportunity to live and study in a
foreign country.

I became convinced that the program of every student --it
should be remembered that every student in the California Abroad
program must have a B average to gain admission—will learn much
more if he or she is encouraged and helped to work out a problem or
research or study during the year. The project might be set up in
consultation with advisers on the home campus before leaving for

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Japan. Or it might be worked out in consultations with professors
in Japan, and with the director, after arrival. The purpose should
always be to get the student into a project that is of special
interest to him or her. I found out, during my stay at Doshisha,
that when a student has such a project, he or she will work hard
and learn much while producing a substantial paper—often written
in Japanese—that has real academic quality.

But I am not sure that either of the above recommendations
will ever be implemented. Why? Because shifting the burden of
enrolling in classes to the student will not only require study and
work in Santa Barbara but undermine the position (justification for
existence) of persons on the staff there. And the second
recommendation will probably not be accepted because shifting a
student's program away from lecture classes to a research paper
will probably be opposed by many students who prefer pipe courses,
and also by directors are not likely to be enthusiastic about
spending so much time consulting with students about their
research.

I think in most cases, the Japanese professors would be
delighted to have a student come into his seminar with a project
already in mind. That I know happened in several cases in Doshisha
while I was there, and then a student should be encouraged to take
only those courses that are related, have some kind of relevance to
this project, and make that whole project the focus of the entire
program. I actually got a few students to do this while I was in
Kyoto. They developed great excitement about the program, and I
think probably have turned out to be productive scholars in that
field. I know of two or three who really caught fire when they got
into some kind of research program.

As a result of that experience, I recommended that all of the
students in all of the programs be required to have that kind of
focus to their program. I think this would make the California
Abroad Program far more exciting for all of the students. Now, of
course, there is the argument that some students just can't think
of anything like that and aren't advanced enough to do anything of
that sort, et cetera, et cetera. All kinds of excuses are used.
But I just can't buy them.

Lage: Or it could become a senior year abroad. They might be a little
more ready for it.

Brown: That's a good idea, but it won't happen, because there is a

requirement at Berkeley I know, and I think at other campuses too,
nobody can graduate from Berkeley unless they have been there in
their senior year. I know that the current director expressed some

312

enthusiasm about the proposal; she said she was going to move in
that direction. So that may happen.

Lage: I have heard from Americans studying in Spain that they are not
supportive of student initiative. The university at the
undergraduate level, anyway, wants students to listen, take notes,
regurgitate, and not think for themselves.

Brown: Well, the situation is sort of mixed in Japan. There is a lot of
that among Japanese teachers. It is the tradition. The teacher
lectures and the students take notes; and there is almost no
discussion.

Lage: They are not supposed to challenge the interpretation.

Brown: No, no, almost no discussion and give and take within the classes.
However, there is a Japanese interest in research. As a matter of
fact, Doshisha University and the International Christian
University both require all graduates to submit a senior thesis.
As a result of that requirement, every professor has an
undergraduate seminar in which students enroll when they are
working on their senior thesis.

Lage: So these students would enroll in such a course?

Brown: This would be a logical course for our own students to participate
in. I think the situation at most Japanese universities is good
for moving in that direction. But you are quite right about the
classes. Usually there is no discussion, no participation; the
students listen and the professors talk.

Lage: Tell me, how is the California Abroad Program funded, and what
kinds of support to the students receive?

Brown: The funding of the California Abroad Program- -which now exists in

more than thirty countries of the world—is always a problem. As I
understand it, virtually no money is supplied by the state of
California. Nearly all support comes from private gifts to the
university, much taking the form of scholarships held by individual
students.

The cost to the individual student always comes up, and it is
my impression that rumors about the high cost of living in Japan
causes many students not even to consider applying. During my
years with the program I discovered that most student participants
held some kind of scholarship during their stay in Japan. Many
worked, and some were given special financial assistance by their
families. But most of them were surprised to find that, in spite
of the popular innre-.sion that Japan was one of the most expensive

313

places in the world in which to live, it was really not all that
more expensive than living at the their home campuses in
California.

Lage: But the cost of living is so high.

Brown: No, including that. Everything that they spent during the year —
cost of living, getting over there and back—doesn't seem to be
that much more than they would be spending during a year at their
home campus. This is not the official position of the California
Abroad Program, and it is not what the individual student usually
says in his letters home, or in his reports to the university.
Rather it was what many of them have said to me in confidence.
These are the students who have learned to eat as the Japanese do
and who have also succeeded in obtaining lucrative jobs teaching
English.

Lage: That is gratifying.

Brown: Of course, costs vary greatly from place to place, and individual
to individual. But there is one cost that is very high and that
cannot be avoided: the cost of getting to and from school by train
or bus. Nearly everyone—including the Japanese, young or old-
spend an hour or two a day getting back and forth to school or
work. And train fares are very high. As for food, the students
soon learn to eat like the Japanese do, and to avoid steaks and
eating at downtown hotels and at famous restaurants.

Lage: They eat a lot of rice.

Brown: Yes, they eat a lot of rice, and fish. They soon find that it is
much less expensive to have their main meal at noon, and at little
restaurants on side streets where most Japanese persons have their
lunches. A noon meal at a famous expensive restaurant is always
much less expensive than in the evening, when persons on expense
accounts do their entertaining.

Housing also varies greatly. But they soon find that it is
possible to have a very nice place to stay, for very little rent,
if they are willing to speak English to the family. And in recent
years more and more universities have built special dormitories for
their foreign students. In some case these are quite plush, and
very inexpensive. Often a student at Nagoya University, for
example, will have his own personal telephone, a separate bath, a
common lounge, and even a place to do some of his or her own
cooking. And the monthly rent is very low.

And they nearly always can easily find a job teaching English
if they neeid more money. As a matter of fact, the opportunities--

314

it may have changed since I was there, but I think it is still
true- -that they can get a job teaching English that will pay them
five or six thousand yen per hour. That gets up to around fifty
dollars an hour if you are thinking in terms of dollars . The
average student spends two or three hours a week teaching English.
Some were so tempted by this opportunity to make money that they
spent too much time teaching English. The Japanese government is
always interested in this situation and the special problems
created by it. But I think that most students are still
supplementing their income by teaching English.

Research Expenses and Support

Lage: Let's talk about the sources of research support. I told you that
I have interviewed people in many different fields, engineering and
the sciences, and we always bring up the subject of where does the
money come from to support the research.

Brown: Now you are talking about faculty research?
Lage: Faculty, and /or graduate student research.

Brown: Well, at the research level, I have often expressed the view—after
talking to people in the history department and in other fields
such as in French history, German history—that money for research
can be more easily obtained for work in Japan than for most other
parts of the world. In part this is because there are two programs
that provide a lot of money for research. One is the Japan
Foundation, which is supported by the Japanese government. There
is nothing quite comparable to this, I think, in other countries of
the world. Then in addition to that, we have the Fulbright program
which in Japan is really two Fulbright programs . One is headed by
the Japan-U.S. Fulbright Commission in Tokyo. I served on that
Commission for five years as an appointee of the U.S. Ambassador to
Japan. One half of the money spent by the Fulbright Commission
came from the Japanese government .

Lage: Oh, it did? And half from our government?

Brown: And half from our government. Originally all the money was

supplied by the U.S. government under the Fulbright Act. But when
I left Japan, half of its money was coming from the Japanese
government. Moreover, a number of donations had been made by
wealthy Japanese industries. So more money was going to Americans
for study in Japan.

315

Lage:

Brown:

Lage:
Brown:

From your experience on the commission, were they interested in
particular areas of study or just the quality of the individuals?

Theoretically it was only the quality of the individual. Therefore
when reviewing grant requests we rated each applicant according to
academic promise and achievement. No field of research stood
higher than any other. But the administrative head of the
commission office, who always participated in our meetings, tended
to assign greater weight to applicants who were women, or to
teachers associated with one of the lesser known colleges or
universities. I felt that the grants should go to people who were
most likely to become a distinguished and influential scholar in
some area of Japanese studies, not just anybody.

Just seeing if they like it or not?

Or those who are simply interested in the experience of living and
working in Japan. In other words, there was a little bit of the
old feeling that Japanese-American relations will be best served by
having any American teacher spend a year in Japan, or by having any
Japanese spend a year in the United States.

Not so much serious scholarship?

No. It was more a living-experience-abroad that they seemed to
value.

I was just looking to see when you were on the commission,
the Fulbright Commission '79 to '84 in Tokyo.

Member

Yes, five years. I was appointed by Ambassador Mike Mansfield. As
a matter of fact, he got me into several things while I was over
there.

Did you know him well?

Since I was on the commission, I was always invited to a lot of the
embassy parties and receptions. I saw him on those occasions.

Was he well regarded in Japan?

Oh yes, very highly regarded. I am inclined to think that the
Japanese rate him the most popular American ambassador they have
ever had, probably because he had a lot of clout in Washington. It
was well known that he had served several terms in the U.S. Senate,
had been a distinguished and influential chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, and could and did do far more than
follow instructions obtained from the Department of State. They
felt and ki ew that on many cases he was not just reporting back to

316

Washington but making recommendations and then gettinp, support
directly from Congress. They liked having an ambassador who had
such influence.

Lage: Anything else about support for research and how it might have
changed over the years?

Brown: There are other foundations that support research in Japan. As I
mentioned earlier, all twelve universities connected with the
Inter-University Center each received a million dollars.

Lage: Was that from the Japanese government?

Brown: Yes.

Lage: So a lot of this is coming from the Japanese government.

Brown: Right. Just recently, the Japanese English teaching program was

expanded so that 800 or more are sent to Japan every year. That is
very important support for Japanese studies. These young people,
after a year in Japan, learn the language quite well and develop a
serious interest in some aspect of Japanese life. Many are
becoming specialists in some aspect of Japanese life or another.
This is tremendously important for Japanese studies generally.

Lage: That is interesting. I wonder if that is part of the government's

aim, or do they just want to-
Brown: Yes, it is clear that the Japanese government not only wants to

offer a larger number of students and scholars the opportunity to
study and carry on research abroad but to have more foreigners,
especially Americans, study in Japan. The sudden expansion in the
number of American college graduates brought to Japan as English
teachers for at least one year—and at a very good salary—came not
long after the Asahi newspaper aired a program on

internationalization in education during the year 1987, in which I
was a participant and which came soon after Mary's death and before
I resigned my position as Director and returned to the U.S.

For this program the Asahi newspaper invited about eight
leading Japanese educators (including the current minister of
education and the presidents of several key universities) and the
American ambassador to Japan (Mike Mansfield) to attend a panel
discussion on internationalism in Japanese education, a program
that was to be broadcast and written up--in full—in the Asahi
newspaper. But instead of accepting the invitation, Ambassador
Mansfield recommended that he be replaced by an American educator
who knew Japan and could participate in the program without the
assistance of an interpreter, namely Professor Df Imer Brown wh D had

317

taught in both in Japan and the United States and was then in
Tokyo as director of the Inter-University Center for Japanese
Language Studies. So I was invited. At the beginning of the
program, it was made clear that I was replacing Ambassador
Mansfield.

A day or two later, what each of us said was written up (in
Japanese and verbatim) in the Asahi Shimbun. Japan's largest and
most influential newspaper. So it would be easy to find out what
each of us said, and I might do that some day. But I remember
quite well the point I made, which was that there was a definite
imbalance in U.S. -Japan exchange programs. Having just completed a
five-year term as a member of the Japan-United States Fulbright
Commission (appointed by Mike Mansfield), I could show that there
were many more (I had precise figures and percentages) Japanese
students and scholars studying in the United States than American
students and scholars studying in Japan. I remember being asked
questions by the moderator that indicated that he was a bit shocked
to hear of such imbalance. And, as I say, it was not long
afterward that the Japanese government began offering hundreds of
teaching positions to American college graduates. The timing
suggests that my remarks had some effect but the same point was
undoubtedly being made, over and over, by many others.

Graduate Students

Lage: Maybe we can talk about some of your graduate students, how you

guided your graduate students, because there are a lot of different
approaches. Do you notice different approaches within the history
department?

Brown: Yes, there are probably as many different approaches as there are

professors, and a given professor is likely to approach each of his
students differently. Moreover, with the passage of time, a given
professor is apt to change his mind on how graduate students should
be trained.

In general, graduate training is centered on guiding,
assisting, improving, and stimulating research on a particular
historical topic or question, which is then written up as a report
(seminar), thesis (M.A. degree), or dissertation (Ph.D. degree).
Since it is assumed that a professor can best guide research that
is in his particular area of expertise, a student's research is
sometimes pretty close to that of his guiding professor. In some
cases it is so close that one is tempted to conclude that the
student has been askel to do reseaich for his professor.

318

Lage: Is that a more old-fashioned or traditional method, or is that
ongoing?

Brown: It is not so much a traditional method as one likely to be followed
by young professors who are confident of guiding research only in
their special fields. Sometimes one student after another
continues to do research in that field, but in other cases (and
this is where I found myself during the last part of my teaching
career) the professor tries to make sure that each student does
research about which he himself has a deep and abiding interest. I
gradually became convinced that a graduate student is likely to
become a creative and productive historical scholar only if he is
constantly driven by the urge to obtain answers to historical
questions that he himself has raised. That is a little more
difficult approach but I think more and more professors are
following that path: trying to get each student to develop his own
historical questions, even his own research method.

Brown: My dissertation was on money economy in medieval Japan. One of my
earliest graduate students (Charles Sheldon, who received an
appointment at Cambridge University in England) wrote his
dissertation on economic developments in seventeenth-century Japan.
It was obviously an extension of my interest.

If their interest was too close to mine, I was a little
embarrassed. My feeling is that a student is much more likely to
be a creative scholar if the area of research is picked out and
developed by him or her, not me. I should not be telling them what
to do, but letting them decide what to do. My function, I thought,
was to encourage and help them to move into a problem that is
theirs, not mine. This approach is a little more difficult, but I
think more and more professors are trying to help a student develop
his own research interest.

Lage: Do you think this is something the students have demanded over the
years? Has the student changed?

Brown: In some cases students may demand it but, in my experience at

least, most do not. Of course student interests continue to change
but I am inclined to think that a student will insist upon making a
particular historical investigation only after he or she has
completed a considerable amount of historical study. Even then, he
usually has not decided precisely what he wants to do.

In my first years of teaching at Berkeley I had a number of
students who had been language officers in one of the military
services, and even lived and worked for some years in Japan. But

319

most of them wrote their dissertation on subjects that had no
connection whatsoever with what they had done during the war.
There was however one notable exception: Royal Wald, who I had the
pleasure of seeing again just a few days ago. After completing the
U.S. Navy's intensive course in Japanese at Boulder, Colorado, he
was assigned to duty with the OSS in China, where I presume he used
his knowledge of Japanese for investigative work. And when he
became a candidate for the Ph.D. degree under me at Berkeley, he
chose to make a study of the Young Officer Movement that led to the
famous February 16 Incident of 1936 when units of the army—under
the leadership of young of f icers--rose up and almost seized control
of the government. Roy certainly understood that this incident was
an important turning point in Japanese history, and he was
determined to find out why these young officers were so
discontented and rebellious. His study has continued to be used
and cited by persons who become immersed in questions about the
subsequent drift toward war. But I myself was then working on a
book on Japanese nationalism. So his interests were somewhat
related to mine.

Lage: Are there any particular graduate students you want to mention who
have been particularly outstanding?

Brown: There are several. I have had more than twenty receive their Ph.D.
degrees under me as the chairman of their respective dissertation
committees, and each one has been a special case to be remembered
and appreciated. So I hesitate to pick out a few that have been
particularly interesting.

If you had asked this question of me a few days ago, I
probably would not have thought to include the name of Royal Wald,
for example, because I have not been in contact with him for
fifteen or twenty years. Moreover, he did not enter the academic
field to become a university professor but became a foreign service
officer in the U.S. Department of State. But since we spent an
evening with Roy and his wife Mazie a few nights ago, I now realize
that he may well be one of the most interesting of all. Although
university professors, especially if their studies require that
they spend some time outside the United States, do have many
opportunities to travel and study in different parts of the world,
foreign service officers such as Royal Wald usually come to hold
very responsible positions in several countries, and for extended
periods of time . Roy not only spent something like five years in
the American Embassy in Tokyo—first in the political affairs
division and then in the division of science and technology—but he
had a rather lengthy stay in Poland while it was still a communist
country, in Iran before the revolution, and in Egypt. Now he and
his wife live in an interesting part of the world that I had never
seen before last Saturday: the neighboring town of C.'-.ay' on where

320

the Walds can see a spur of Mt. Diablo from their front-room
window.

I might have missed mentioning Roy, but not the likes of
Richard Miller, Ronald Anderson, Charles Sheldon, Wilbur Fridell,
Hilary Conroy, Thomas Havens, Frank Ikle, George Moore, and
Benjamin Hazard. These nine stand out because they have made
distinguished contributions to our understanding of the life and
culture of Japan, held professorships at distinguished
universities, and stayed in touch. David Abosch (an analytical
thinker) and Jack Harrison (an enthusiastic and stimulating
teacher) have both published and become professors of Japanese
history at the university level; but I have seen them only once or
twice since they received their doctoral degrees. Philip Thompson,
too, should be mentioned because he was a very bright and promising
student who, like Dick Miller, raised fundamental questions about
sovereignty in ancient Japan and translated such important ancient-
history sources as rescripts handed down by eighth-century emperors
and empresses. Philip spent a year on research under Professor
Ishida at Tohoku University in Sendai and was then appointed
assistant professor of Japanese history at Toronto University. For
a year or two, he kept sending me portions of his dissertation,
which were all very good. And I always wrote back to say that they
were good. But for some reason--! heard that he had "psychological
problems"--he never finished the dissertation. And presumably
because he did not, Toronto did not promote him to tenure. He did
not write me after that, but from others I heard rumors of divorce
and suicide. What a tragedy!

I recall two other cases of persons that were very interesting
but are not included in my list. One, whose name I can not
remember, was very bright, had remarkable intellectual curiosity,
and was blessed with a talent for historical analysis. I remember
saying that he was one of the most interesting students that I had
ever had in a graduate seminar--! often compared him with David
Abosch. He intended to become a historian specializing in Japanese
history. Knowing that he needed a working knowledge of the
Japanese language, he signed up for a course in Japanese. But
after a month or two he told me that he just could not cope with
that language- -that he did not have what it takes to make it a
useful historical tool. He moved into some other field and I never
saw him again.

The other might-have-been case was Dr. Peter Wetzler who was
also a determined, hard-working, bright, interesting, and promising
scholar but who did not become a tenured professor at a leading
American university. I first came into contact with him when he
entered my undergraduate class in Japanese history at the
International Christian University in Tokyo. He was then a student

321

in the California Abroad Program where he met, and later married, a
beautiful Japanese girl named Chizuko. After graduating from the
Santa Barbara campus of the University of California he applied for
admission to the graduate school at Berkeley so that he could work
for the Ph.D. degree in Japanese history under me. During his
graduate training he worked very hard and wrote excellent seminar
papers. Mary and I often had dinner with Peter and Chizuko, both
at our homes in Berkeley and at our cabin at Lake Tahoe. Toward
the end of his graduate study he received a fellowship that
permitted him to carry on research under Professor Ishida in
Sendai, just as Thompson had done. Peter had a desk alongside
several Japanese graduate students studying under Ishida and soon
gained command of both written and spoken Japanese. He dug deeply
into Confucian learning during the century or two that followed the
Great Reforms of 645 and wrote a very good dissertation on an
important problem in ancient Japanese intellectual history.

But during those years of research in Japan his marriage broke
up. And although he received an assistant professor appointment at
the University of Illinois after receiving the doctorate, he was
not awarded tenure and had to leave. I do not know what went wrong
at Illinois but the breakup of his marriage and his judgmental
tendencies probably made it difficult for him to establish
harmonious relationships with his students and colleagues. That is
only a guess. Anyway he then went to Germany where he remarried
and started a translation service. He knew English, Japanese, and
German (which he had learned at home); and his new wife knew a
couple of other languages. So they did translations in various
languages and many fields. For several years his business seems to
have thrived, but eventually (I have heard) his second marriage
also broke up and his translation business folded. He then went
back to Japan where he obtained a number of teaching positions,
including one (as I recall) that involved teaching Japanese history
in Japanese to Japanese college students. When I last saw him, I
think he said he had married another Japanese woman and was doing
what he liked most: teaching Japanese history in Japan. So he was
a very interesting man--an excellent swimmer by the way--but he
never became a productive scholar at an American university. That
is no reason, however, why I should not list him as a particularly
interesting graduate student.

Richard Miller, Specialist in the History of Japanese
Bureaucracy

Brown: Of the nine that I have listed I intended to speak first about Dr,
Richard Miller, who was among the. first to receive a Ph.D. in

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Japanese history under my supervision, and with whom I was rather
closely associated right down to the time of his sudden and early
death about twenty years ago. Before he began working in Japanese
history under me, he had already done considerable study in the
East Asian language department where he had achieved competence not
only in Japanese but in Chinese and, as I recall, in Tibetan and
Mongolian as well. He also knew and collected East Asian art.
Because of his interest in that area, I have often thought he might
have become an even more interesting and creative historian if he
had taken up subjects and problems in art history rather than
institutional history. Because of his amazing collections of
prints, paintings, pottery, fabrics, netsuke, et cetera, Professor
Ishida once said, after a visit to the Millers in Davis, that their
home was like a museum. Dick knew a lot about many things, even
how to make money by buying and fixing up homes that could be (and
were) sold for considerable profit. He was also an accomplished
interior decorator and gardener.

It was at UC Davis that he produced the two volumes that are
used and cited by anyone attempting to understand some aspect of
the rapid and fundamental changes in Japanese life after the Great
Reform movement of the seventh and eighth centuries.1 Mary and I
had lunch with him one day on our way to Tahoe, at the grand
Victorian house that he and Marion had recently purchased,
restored, and redecorated in an authentic Victorian style. That
day is well remembered because Dick told me, in some detail and
with great enthusiasm, just what he was doing on his current
project: a study of Japan's eighth-century bureaucracy. After our
lunch with the Millers we drove to Lake Tahoe and the next morning
Marion called to say that Dick had had a sudden stroke and died a
few hours after our departure.

That was a terrible shock, for Dick was far more than a former
student. Shortly after he had completed his Ph.D. dissertation, I
was appointed representative for the Asia Foundation in Tokyo where
there was an opening for an associate director, and I recommended
Dick. So we saw each other and worked together every day for a
full year.

Lage: Was this before he did his scholarly work, his time with the Asia
Foundation?

'Richard J. Miller, Ancient Japanese Nobility: The Kabane Ranking
System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Japan's First
Bureaucracy: A Study of Eighth-Century Government. Cornell University East
Asia papers, no. 19 (Ithaca: China-Japan Program, Cornell University,
1978) .

323

Brown: Both before and after. He had of course completed his dissertation
before I was appointed director of the Asia Foundation in Tokyo in
1955. While he was in the Asia Foundation—probably about eight
years—he continued to study the language and culture of the Asian
countries where he worked. But his major publications were
produced after he left the Foundation to become a professor, first
at the International Christian University in Tokyo and then at the
University of California in Davis.

Because he spoke Japanese so well, and was a tall man who knew
a lot about many things, he was able to establish meaningful
contacts with prominent scholars—as well as with prominent
literary figures and artists— with whom the Asia Foundation was
working in trying to reinforce free and democratic ideals and
institutions. Indeed he was so good that he stayed on with the
Asia Foundation for several years, serving as the Foundation's
representative in the Philippines (or was it Taiwan?) and Pakistan
--where he picked up more artistic treasures. Then he contracted a
disease that forced him to stay in bed for several months.

He continued, however, to wish that he could return to the
academic life of teaching and research and therefore readily
accepted an offer of a professorial appointment at the
International Christian University in Tokyo. That was where he was
teaching Japanese history when I went to that same university in
1967 as director of the California Abroad Program. So we and the
Millers saw a lot of each other for another two years— we were
colleagues in the same university and at a time when the student
movement was boiling. Dick and Marion were then living in a small,
old, and interesting house that had been built long before World
War II, when that area had been the private estate of a local
dignitary. The house continued to be a museum-piece- -with a
thatched roof, tatami floors, ancient gates, et cetera- -but only
the Millers wanted to live there. When we had dinner at that
little house, everything was always in the ancient and beautiful
Japanese style, and the food was always tasty.

One day when Dick and Marion were driving along the shore of
the peninsula on which the Narita Airport is located, they came to
a long stretch of ugly and desolate land that had been strip-mined.
Noting that this cheap and undesirable property was located along a
beautiful shore line, Dick got the idea that it could be restored.
So he bought ten acres at a very low price. Then he had many
truck-loads of topsoil hauled in, trees planted, and a beautiful
little cottage built where he and Marion could spend their weekends
beside the sea. We spent several pleasant days there with them.
Not surprisingly, the value of the land increased rapidly and
within a few years he sold a small part of the ten acres at a price

324

well above what he had spent on buying and restoring the land, and
on building and furnishing that beautiful cottage.

Ronald Anderson, a Close Friend and a Scholar of Buddhism

Brown: Another person who received his Ph.D. degree under me in those

early years was not just a graduate student but an old friend that
I continued to see and enjoy right down to his death about fifteen
years ago. That was Ronald Anderson who not only did his graduate
work under me but got me a teaching position in Japan back in 1932.
He traveled with me by boat from Seattle to Yokohama in September
of that year, went with me by train from Tokyo to Kanazawa to
introduce me to the new situation there, invited me to me to his
home in Fukuoka for my first Christmas in Japan, went with me on a
spring-vacation trip to Shanghai- -which ended before we got to
Shanghai—in the spring of 1933, shared a cabin with me at Lake
Nojiri during the summers of 1933 and 1934, and served as best man
when Mary and I got married at Lake Nojiri at the end of the 1934
summer. After that we continued to exchange letters, and when I
returned to the United States I served as best man at his wedding.
During the war we did not see that much of each other since I was
in Hawaii and he was on the mainland. But with the close of the
war, our paths crossed again because he was in Kyoto as a civilian
employee of SCAP's education division during the summer of 1948
when I went to Japan as a consultant in higher education for that
same education division. The SCAP education division was then
headed by Colonel Donald Nugent, whom we had both known for many
years, since all three of us had gone to Stanford and had taught
English for several years in Japan during the 1930s. Shortly after
that, Ronald and his second wife Lucile returned to Berkeley so
that Ronald might work for the Ph.D. degree under me, creating a
strange situation in which two old friends found themselves in a
student-teacher relationship and with the teacher (me) being three
or four years younger than his student (Ron) .

But our friendship survived because Ronald was a bright and
conscientious learner and I did my best to be helpful and
supportive, and by not being, I think, unreasonably demanding and
critical. He wrote an interesting dissertation on the Pure Land
Buddhist sect with which he had worked while in Kyoto. Then he
received an appointment at the University of Michigan. A few years
later he accepted an offer to join the School of Education at the
University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where he taught and lived until
his death. While Professor Ishida and I were at the East West
Center for joint research in the mid-sixties, Mary and I again had
pleasant times v itt Ronald and Lucilt:. Then in 1984, when Mary and

325

I were home from Japan for a visit, Ren had a great party to
celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. Ronald and Lucile were of
course invited- -he had not only been best man at the wedding we
were celebrating but had taken moving pictures which I still have.
But they said that they could not attend. I telephoned to back up
the invitation, only to discover that cancer on the side of Ron's
face made it necessary for him to stay near his doctor in Honolulu.
He died soon afterward.

Yale Maxon was my successor at that same Fourth Higher School
in Kanazawa, and he too came to Berkeley for graduate work toward
the Ph.D., not in history but in political science. Like Ronald
Anderson and me, Yale had learned his Japanese in Japan. And like
me, he received a commission in the U.S. Navy and was assigned to
intelligence work in Hawaii. But he was on duty with the 12th
Naval District Intelligence Office in Honolulu whereas I was with
combat intelligence under Admiral Nimitz in Pearl Harbor. After
receiving the Ph.D. degree, he taught at the Merritt College in
Oakland.

So Ronald, Yale, and I have been associated with each other in
different ways for over fifty years. All three of us graduated
from Stanford, taught at the Fourth Higher School in Japan, used
our knowledge of Japan and the Japanese language in the war against
Japan, became involved in graduate work at Berkeley, and entered a
career of teaching and research on Japan at the university level.

Charles Sheldon, an Outstanding Student and Scholar

Brown: Another interesting graduate student is also deceased, Charles
Sheldon, whom I have already mentioned as the one who became a
lecturer—English equivalent of professor—at Cambridge University
in England. Sheldon and I first became acquainted when I was in
Tokyo as a consultant for SCAP in the summer of 1948. That was
when Charles, as well as my old friend Yale, were on assignments
with what is known as the War Crimes Trial. Yale was serving as an
interpreter for the lawyers who were prosecuting General To jo while
Sheldon was in the documents division of the prosecution section.

Charles and I attended some academic meeting at which we were
the only Americans present. The meeting was conducted entirely in
Japanese. When he and I, as foreign guests, were asked to say
something, it was assumed that we would speak in Japanese. Which
we did. And that was when Sheldon became interesting, for he not
only spoke naturally and fluently, but had mastered polite forms of
speech for a public address and could even crack jokes and make

326

humorous remarks in Japanese. I was really impressed. Although
his training in Japanese had been limited to a year of intensive
training as a Japanese language officer, plus the experience he had
picked up in Tokyo with the War Crimes Trial, he really had
mastered it. Clearly he had been using and studying the language
intensively during months and years in Japan.

I must have been of some interest to him, too, because some
months later he wrote me to say that he had applied for admission
to the graduate division at Berkeley so that he could work toward
the Ph.D. degree in Japanese history under me. But his application
was rejected because his grades as an undergraduate in Santa
Barbara had been low. Since I had been so greatly impressed with
his Japanese and I felt he had the makings of a scholar, I wrote a
letter to the dean of admissions asking that his low undergraduate
grades be overlooked. I expressed the view that he had become a
learner during his time in Tokyo, obviously developing a curiosity
about Japan and its culture that would last. That was the only
time, I think, that I have ever asked that an admission-rejection
be reconsidered. And it worked.

For his dissertation he followed my current interest in
economic history by digging into the rise of Japan's merchant class
at the end of the seventeenth century. When the time came for his
dissertation, he was able to go to Kyoto for research. I wrote a
letter of recommendation to Professor Kobata Atsushi, whom I had
never met but whose books and articles on economic activities in
medieval Japan were important for my own dissertation research.
Professor Kobata did not simply meet Charles during an office hour
but invited him to work at a desk in his study at the Kyoto
University. Of course Charles was delighted to receive such
special treatment and, during the year, gained even greater mastery
of both spoken and written Japanese. The dissertation was later
published as a book that continues to be used and cited.2 After a
short assignment in Washington, he received an offer to teach at
Cambridge University in England, which he readily accepted.
Although his salary was lower than it had been in the U.S., he
wanted to go because his wife was French and welcomed the
opportunity to be closer to her relatives in France.

In order to cover the cost of moving to England, and buying a
home at Cambridge, he sold a collection of netsuke that he had put
together during his stay in Japan. I remember seeing that

2Charles David Sheldon, The Rise of the Merchant Class in Tokugawa
Japan, 1600-1868; An Introductory Survey. Monographs of the Association
for Asian Studies, 5 (Locust Valley, N.Y.: Published for the Association
for Asian Studies by J.J. Augustin, 1958).

327

collection and being impressed by it. At a time when such carved
ivory pieces could be obtained at an amazingly low price, he set
out to get representative pieces—that is, one of each type
(monkey, child, horse, fox, et cetera) of the ivory pieces that
were carved into decorative objects (no more than two or three
inches long) that were attached to the belt of samurai. These all
dated from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. He had also
gone to the trouble of having a beautiful box made that had a
little drawer for each of his netsuke. So when he moved to England
he sold the entire collection, obtaining enough money to buy a nice
home in Cambridge.

When Margaret and I spent a month or so driving around
England, we stopped by that Sheldon home at Cambridge. Charles had
died some years earlier but his French wife was still living in
that delightful home. She showed us around the university, and her
fondness for life there made us see and understand why he had
enjoyed teaching and carrying on research in the field of Japanese
history at Cambridge University.

Benjamin Hazard did his dissertation on the activities of
Japanese pirates in medieval Korea, and after receiving the Ph.D.
also was appointed to a position in the history department at the
California State University of San Jose. He has worked on at least
two fine books, one of them with George Moore.3

Ben was on duty with the army in Japan when I went there in
the summer of 1948 as a consultant in higher education with SCAP.
Ben had access to a jeep that made my life in Tokyo that summer
much more pleasant, and also easier to collect books for the
university—the East Asian Library had not yet come into existence.
Ben and I also had a mutual friend, Imai Kichinosuke, who was head
of the Maeda collection housed in the Sonkeikaku Bunko.

Still another interesting graduate student was Hilary Conroy
who became a professor of history at the University of
Pennsylvania. In addition to learning Japanese during World War II
and electing to specialize in Japanese history, Hilary was a good
musician, as was his wife, Charlotte. But they were different.
Hilary preferred popular music and played by ear, and was
apparently unable to read music. Charlotte, on the other hand,

3Benjamin H. Hazard, Eilyn Katoh, George E. Moore (editors), Japanese
Books on Modern Japan. Japanese Bibliographies, no. 1 (Berkeley: East
Asian Studies, Institute of International Studies, University of
California, 1958); Takashi Hatada, A History of Korea. Translated and
edited by Warren W. Smith, Jr. and Benjamin H. Hazard (Santa Barbara,
California: ABC-Clio, 1969).

328

liked classical music, read music, and played beautifully. Each
seemed to envy the musical abilities of the other. They were both
tall and slender, and great dancers. Mary and I had an evening
with them at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo—that must have been
around 1956 when I was with the Asia Foundation—and they wowed us,
and everybody else, with their dancing. Not only that, they were
good tennis players. So Hilary must have impressed his students at
Pennsylvania in many different ways. He has edited several books
and written numerous articles. His major book- length study is on
Japanese militarism in Korea/

Hilary is now retired but, as far as I know, has not returned
to California, although a daughter of theirs is teaching Japanese
history, or something else in the area of Japanese studies. The
last I heard she was a professor on the Irvine campus of the
University of California.

But there have been many other interesting students, such as
Frank Ikle. Frank received some of his education in Switzerland,
and therefore had mastered French and gained some familiarity with
different aspects of European culture before spending a year on an
intensive study of Japanese in the U.S. Navy. Frank wrote his
dissertation on relations between Germany and Japan in prewar
years. And after receiving the Ph.D. degree, he obtained an
appointment at Reed College in Oregon. Later he moved to the
University of New Mexico where he was to be appointed chairman of
the history department.

Thomas Havens, Wilbur Fridell, and Janet Goodwin: A New
Generation of Graduate Students

Brown: Another very interesting student of mine Thomas Havens who is now a
professor of History and librarian of the East Asian Library on the
Berkeley campus of the University of California.

Lage: Is that one we need to fill in?

Brown: Yes, because Tom and Bill Fridell and Jan [Janet R.] Goodwin were
students of a new generation that had not learned Japanese before
or during World War II, they did not have the benefit of a full
year of intensive work in the language in either the army or navy.
Bill learned his Japanese during some seventeen years of missionary

"Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Seizure of Korea. 1868-1910
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).

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work in Japan but both Tom and Jan started off with lots of course
work in the language at the university level, followed by years of
study and research in Japan. Probably Bill achieved greater
mastery of the spoken language, but all three were able to carry
out research in Japanese materials leading to the publication of
numerous books and articles. Both Jan and Bill worked in the
religious field where I have been concentrating my energies for the
last fifteen or twenty years. Bill's research led to the
publication of book in the mid-1970s.5

Jan was able to get to Japan for the study of the language
while she was working on her dissertation. She worked in popular
religious movements of ancient times. After receiving the degree,
she obtained temporary appointments at colleges and universities on
the West Coast, including USC. Now she is a professor at Aizu
University in northern Japan. Her excellent book was published by
the University of Hawaii Press.6 She also translated two chapters
--one by the distinguished anthropologist, Okazaki Takashi, and the
other by a leading scholar of ancient Shinto, Matsumae Takeshi- -for
Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Japan. Her translations were
scholarly and well written.

Bill taught in the religions department of the University of
California at Santa Barbara. Bill died a few years ago but, Jan is
now living in Los Angeles and seems to be devoting much of her time
to an Internet web site (called H-Japan) which is heavily used by
academics carrying out research in the Japanese field.

Tom Havens has made the greatest academic splash, for he has
not only written six distinguished books in modern Japanese history
but has held such high academic posts as chairman of the history
department at Connecticut College and chairman of the Department of
East Asian Languages and Culture at the University of Illinois,
Urbana. Before that, he had served as editor of the Journal of
Asian Studies, and now he is professor of history and librarian of
the East Asian Library at UC Berkeley, which is reputed to be one
of the two best libraries in the country. Now he is deeply
involved in the planning, funding, and building of a new library
that will cost some $24 million.

Thomas Havens had studied only a bit of Japanese in Princeton
when he came to Berkeley for work toward the Ph.D. in Japanese

5Wilbur M. Fridell, Japanese Shrine Mergers. 1906-12; State Shinto
Moves to the Grassroots (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973).

6 Janet R. Goodwin, Alms and Vagabonds : Buddhist Tetrples and Popular
Patronage in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994)

330

history. But he worked hard and completed all requirements for the
degree in about three years, an astonishing feat. He apparently
was able to do this because he did not have to work while he was a
graduate student and because he was a hard worker and well
organized. His papers, always handed in on time, showed an amazing
amount of work in a wide range of sources . After completing his
dissertation on Nishi Amane, he received an appointment at
Connecticut College.

Tom has had several one-year grants for research in Japan and
published six good books, averaging about one every four years.
And they range widely. Beginning with a book on Nishi Amane (a
writer and thinker of the nineteenth century) published in 1970, he
has written books on agrarian nationalism (1974); the Japanese in
World War II (1978); artists and patrons in Japan between 1955 and
1980 (1982); the Vietnam War and Japan (1987); and the rich
Tsutsumi family (199A). His publications have all been based on
extensive work in Japanese sources as well as on interviews with
Japanese individuals who had first-hand knowledge of the subject
being investigated.7

Lage: Were your later graduate students quite different?

Brown: Yes, they were younger and faced the problem of learning enough
Japanese to use it for research. Not having had a year of
intensive training in the language in either the army or the navy,
they had to learn their Japanese in courses at an American
university.

I remember saying that a graduate student in Japanese history
should normally plan to devote one half of his or her time on the
study of Japanese, and the other half on study for graduate
seminars. Many also had to work, forcing them to spend an
inordinate amount of time getting their degrees. One of the

'Thomas Havens, Nishi Amane and Modern Japanese Thought (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1970); Farm and Nation in Modern Japan;
Agrarian Nationalism. 1870-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1974); Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (New York:
Norton, 1978); Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan; Dance. Music, Theater,
and the Visual Arts, 1955-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1982); Fire Across the Sea; The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965-1975
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); The Ambivalence of
Nationalism; Modern Japan between East and West (Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America, 1990); Architects of Affluence; The Tsutsumi
Family and the Seibu-Saison Enterprises in Twentieth Century Japan
(Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, Harvard
University Press, 1994).

331

brightest and most promising graduates to take seminar work under
me (I can't remember his name) finally decided to withdraw from
graduate school, saying that he just could not devote so much time
to working on that impossible language.

Students who Entered Other Disciplines

Lage: Did any of your students, in either undergraduate courses and or
graduate seminars, become professors in disciplines other than
history?

Brown: Oh yes, I can think of five within the University of California
system, four of whom are, or have been at Berkeley.

William and Helen McCullough were in my undergraduate class on
Japanese history shortly after I went there in 1946. Later they
both entered the graduate division for work toward the Ph.D. in
East Asian languages and literature, and both were appointed to
teaching positions in the East Asian language department. They
worked together on a two-volume translation of the famous Eiga
Monogatari.8

Bill became chairman of the East Asian Language Department.
And after Don Shively moved to Berkeley to head the East Asian
Library, Bill took over the editorship of Volume II of The
Cambridge History of Japan. But because of illness, and after
Don's retirement, the editorship of that volume was returned to
Don.

Helen began teaching in the East Asian Language Department at
about the time that Bill did, but as a lecturer. She was
apparently not given a professorial appointment because she was a
woman married to a professor in the same department. But in the
1970s when affirmative action was in the air, she finally became a
professor. I remember supporting the move. Recently she has
received a decoration from the Emperor of Japan for scholarly work
in the field of Japanese literature.

Fred Wakeman came from Harvard to get his Ph.D. degree in
Chinese history under Joseph Levenson, but audited my undergraduate

8Eiga Monogatari; A Tale of Flowering Fortunes: Annals of Japanese
Aristocratic Life in the Heian Period. Translated into English, with
introduction and notes by William H. McCullough and Helen Craig McCullough
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).

332

lectures on Japanese history and had a graduate seminar with me.
Fred is now generally rated as America's leading Chinese historian,
holds an endowed chair, and is director of the Institute of East
Asian Studies. He has written several distinguished books.9

Chalmers Johnson sat in the front row of my undergraduate
course in Japanese history and went on to get his Ph.D. in
political science and to become a distinguished professor of
Japanese politics at Berkeley. He is said to have received and
turned down offers from such distinguished universities as Harvard
but finally did accept an offer from the San Diego campus of the
University of California. He has published a number of interesting
and influential books. His most recent book is creating a stir.

Hans Baerwald too was an early student in my undergraduate
course. He was born in Japan and knew Japanese so well that he had
a responsible position with the Occupation. He took his graduate
work in political science, obtained the Ph.D. degree under Robert
Scalapino, and received a teaching appointment at the University of
California in Los Angeles. In 1967, I followed him as director of
the California Program in Tokyo, and in 1969 he went back to Tokyo
for a second term as director. He is known for his contacts among
prominent political figures and has written articles in Japanese
about the Japanese parliament.

Carl Bielefeldt also took my undergraduate lecture course on
Japanese history. Although that must have been at least thirty
years ago, I still remember that his paper on some aspect of
Buddhism was so good that I awarded him a grade and scribbled,
"This is the best undergraduate paper I have ever read." He is now
a professor of Buddhism at Stanford and has written such
distinguished books as Manuals of Zen Meditation, published by the
University of California Press in 1988.

A recent graduate student of mine at Starr King, Lisa
Grumbach, has gone to Stanford to work under Carl. After
graduating from Harvard, she spent about five years in Japan and
has an excellent command of the language. She has great scholarly

'Frederic E. Wakeman, The Great Enterprise; The Manchu Reconstruction
of Imperial Order in Seventeenth Century China (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985); Policing Shanghai. 1927-1937 (Berkeley, University
of California Prass, 1995); The Shanghai Badlands; Wartime Terrorism and
Urban Crime. 1917-41 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

333

promise, especially now that she is working on religion under one
of the country's leading Buddhist scholars.

Edwin A. Cranston says that he was enrolled in my

undergraduate course on Japanese history, but I don't remember him
as an undergraduate. He went on to get his Ph.D. in ancient
Japanese literature at Harvard, and to become a Harvard professor.
He contributed a great chapter to Volume 1 of The Cambridge History
of Japan entitled "Asuka and Nara Culture: Literacy, Literacy, and
Music" and recently completed a two-volume work.10

Now I have a new crop of students that have been working under
me at the Graduate Theological Union [GTU] in Berkeley. There I
have been teaching graduate students specializing in religion since
my return from Japan in 1987. I keep saying that I have enjoyed
teaching these students more than those at UC Berkeley. Probably
that is because my own study has been primarily in the religious
field ever since I started translating Muraoka's book on Shinto
Thought , which was published in 1964. These more recent students
include Lisa Grumbach who is now working for her Ph.D. degree at
Stanford University, Mark Kara who is now completing his Ph.D.
degree at GTU and teaching at a Christian seminary in Kobe, Japan,
and Chizuko Saito who is doing research for her Ph.D. dissertation
in the field of religious psychology at GTU.

One has already made quite a reputation for himself, Professor
John Nelson, who is now a professor of Japanese studies at the
University of Texas. John was working for his Ph.D. degree in the
Anthropology Department at Berkeley when he heard from Professor
George Williams of Chico State University about me and the course I
was teaching on Shinto at GTU. So John attended that seminar and
then received a Fulbright Scholarship that allowed him to spend a
full year researching the Kamigamo Shrine of Kyoto, Japan. Since
he had already lived in Japan five or six years before entering the
graduate school at Berkeley, and had a Japanese wife, he was
competent in both oral and written Japanese. Before coming to
Berkeley, and while he was in Nagasaki, he has been investigating
beliefs and practices at an old Shinto shrine. That work led to
the publication of a book entitled A Year in the Life of a Shinto
Shrine, which is now being used as a textbook in Shinto courses- -
not only in mine and his but in Professor Helen Hardacre's course
at Harvard University.11 John has been attending conferences on

10A Waka Anthology. Translated with Commentary and Notes by Edwin A.
Cranston (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

11 John K. Nelson, A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1996).

334

Shinto all over the United States, and in Japan. He is now taking
the lead in a project of the Shinto Center at Berkeley (I am the
director) which is involved in a joint project with the Kokugakuin
University of Tokyo in producing a Shinto database.

Lage: Is he in anthropology?

Brown: Yes, but at the University of Texas his subject is something like
Japanese studies. His courses are really mostly on Japanese
religion, probably the anthropology of religion.

Lage: Would it be different, then, from the way you would approach the

same topic, he being an anthropologist and you being an historian?

Brown: Yes, I think so. As an anthropologist, he probably gives much more
emphasis to comparisons with other religions and to anthropological
thought about various aspects of religion. Moreover, he gives
special attention to field work and descriptive studies of what
really happens at rituals. I think I miss--regret, let's put it
that way- -that he doesn't have more of an historical interest, more
interest in how things really got started and developed, not just
what they are like now.

Lage: Did you have trouble with the problem that is always mentioned in
the humanities: how long graduate students take to get their Ph.D.
degrees?

Brown: We have always had that problem in the History Department. Tom

Havens, however, was an exception. He got his degree in about the
minimum length of time, about three years, because he was extremely
well organized and very conscientious. He not only took care of
all the assignments, but usually did something more; and he was
always on time. He got through his program in a remarkably short
time and has continued to write a book every four or five years
since then.

I don't recall any of my students really spending too much
time. When you work for a degree in the Asian field, you have this
problem of language. That forces a student to spend much more time
getting ready for research. A lot of my students didn't spend
enough time. Some really didn't have an opportunity to work on
Japanese in Japan, usually, until they were working on their
dissertation. But most of them were able to get a grant from the
Fulbright Commission or from one of the foundations for study in
Japan while they were working on their dissertation, but not before
that, and for no more than one year.

Lage: So they may not have had outstanding language?

335

Brown: Those who had spent a year with the army or navy, and lived long in
Japan, were fairly well equipped. But later ones really didn't
have enough language to use the materials easily or to discuss
historical problems with Japanese scholars in Japanese.

Lage: Yes, the kind of things you had the benefit of.

Brown: I didn't have enough of it either. You really never get enough.

Lage: Well, maybe you just never have enough, but you surely had a lot of
it. Have you had any Asian- American students, Japanese Americans
who studied for the Ph.D. in Japanese studies?

Brown: Yes, but not many.

George Moore was born in Japan as the son of Lardner Moore, a
missionary who was at his Lake Nojiri cottage in the summer of 1934
when Mary and I met and were married. George therefore knew the
language very well. When he first entered my seminar, one summer,
he was teaching at Piedmont High School. He took my seminar
primarily to get some additional units required for advancement as
a teacher in the Piedmont system. But he was so good and so bright
and so interested in Japanese history that I encouraged him to go
on for a Ph.D., which he did.

George wrote his dissertation on the Kumamoto Band of
Christians that played an important role in the founding of
Doshisha University during the 1890s. Shortly afterward, he was
appointed to the history department at the California State
University at San Jose. For several years he was departmental
chairman.

Lage: That is a nice story.

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